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THE NEW POLITICS 

AND OTHER PAPERS 




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THE NEW POLITICS 

AND 

OTHER PAPERS BY 

WILLIAM GARROTT BROWN 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1914 



B67 



COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY EUGENE L. BROWN 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published May iqi4 



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©CLAS7175S 



TO THE MEMORY OF 
GROVER CLEVELAND 



CONTENTS 

THE NEW POLITICS — 

THE ISSUES 3 

PARTIES AND MEN 30 

PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA . 63 

THE WHITE PERIL: THE IMMEDIATE 

DANGER OF THE NEGRO . . .103 

THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON . . .143 

PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY . . 163 

GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS — 

TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT, MARCH 4, 1909 . 1 97 

TO WILLIAM H. TAFT, MARCH 4, 1909 . . 2o6 

TO WILLIAM H. TAFT, MARCH 4, 1913 , . 2l6 

TO WOODROW WILSON, MARCH 4, 1913 . . 226 



THE NEW POLITICS 



THE NEW POLITICS 



I 

THE ISSUES 



TO a superficial view there is little in the 
present state of our public affairs to sug- 
gest the notion of any marked transition. There 
are no wars or rumors of wars ; even the prophe- 
cies and forebodings of that sort of excitement 
seem to lack conviction. They are but mildly 
lugubrious, and yield few shudders. Peace reigns 
— and prosperity, which is tamer still. Nor is 
there any "malice domestic " that looks particu- 
larly threatening. Sectional jealousies, though 
occasionally stirred, do not leap into flame. Party 
feeling, as between the two great parties, has sel- 
dom been so weak. Exciting and dramatic per- 
sonal rivalries are equally wanting. There is 
nothing, for instance, to compare with the long 
confrontments of Jefferson and Hamilton, of Clay 
and Jackson, of Douglas and Lincoln. There is, 
indeed, a vigorous and heated struggle between 
two factions in one of the great parties, and the 

3 



THE NEW POLITICS 

two wings of the other great party may soon fol- 
low suit and favor us with a set-to ; but neither 
division has as yet gone far enough to produce 
changes that can be regarded as clearly revolu- 
tionary. 

But great changes in the political life of a 
people do not always come violently, dramati- 
cally. Some of the greatest have come, like those 
in nature, quietly. There is, I believe, a feeling 
among thoughtful men that such a change is in 
fact coming over our political life to-day ; and 
very good reasons may be given for this view. 

Twenty-two years ago, Mr. Bryce, coming to 
the end of his " American Commonwealth," had 
this to say about the future : — 

America, in her swift onward progress, sees, looming 
on the horizon and now no longer distant, a time of 
mists and shadows, wherein dangers may be concealed 
whose form and magnitude she can scarcely yet conjec- 
ture. As she fills up her Western regions with inhabit- 
ants, she sees the time approach when all the best land 
will have been occupied, and when the land now under 
cultivation will have been so far exhausted as to yield 
scantier crops even to more expensive culture. Al- 
though transportation may also have then become 
cheaper, the price of food will rise ; farms will be less 



THE NEW POLITICS 

easily obtained and will need more capital to work them 
with profit ; the struggle for existence will become more 
severe. And while the outlet which the West now 
provides for the overflow of the great cities will have 
become less available, the cities will have grown im- 
mensely more populous ; pauperism, now confined to 
some six or seven of the greatest, will be more widely 
spread ; wages will probably sink and work be less 
abundant. In fact, the chronic evils and problems of 
old societies and crowded countries, such as we see 
them to-day in Europe, will have reappeared on this 
new soil. 

More than eighty years ago — that is to say, 
sixty years before Mr. Bryce's forecast — Macau- 
lay, who never saw America, writing a reply to 
John Stuart Mill's essay on government, and 
controverting Mill's view that monarchies and 
aristocracies are always more rapacious than de- 
mocracies, introduced this striking passage: — 

Despots, we see, do plunder their subjects, though 
history and experience tell them that, by prematurely 
exacting the means of profusion, they are in fact de- 
vouring the seed-corn from which the future harvest 
of revenue is to spring. Why, then, should we sup- 
pose that the people will be deterred from procuring 
immediate relief and enjoyment by the fear of distant 
calamities — of calamities which perhaps may not be 
fully felt till the times of their grandchildren? . . . 



THE NEW POLITICS 

The case of the United States is not in point. In a 
country where the necessities of life are cheap and the 
wages of labor high, where a man who has no capital 
but his legs and arms may expect to become rich by 
industry and frugality, it is not very decidedly even for 
the immediate advantage of the poor to plunder the 
rich ; and the punishment of doing so would very 
speedily follow the offense. But in countries in which 
the great majority live from hand to mouth, and in 
which vast masses of wealth have been accumulated by 
a comparatively small number, the case is widely dif- 
ferent. The immediate want is, at particular seasons, 
craving, imperious, irresistible. In our own time it has 
steeled men to the fear of the gallows, and urged them 
on the point of the bayonet. And, if these men had at 
their command that gallows, and those bayonets, which 
now scarcely restrain them, what is to be expected ? 
Nor is this state of things one which can exist only 
under a bad government. . . . Therefore, the better 
the government, the greater is the inequality of condi- 
tions ; and the greater the inequality of conditions, the 
stronger are the motives which impel the populace to 
spoliation. As for America, we appeal to the twentieth 
century. 

The twentieth century is upon us. Mr. Bryce 
named thirty years as the period which, in the 
opinion of the best judges, still intervened be- 
tween the America he was writing about and 
the coming of the time when Americans would 

6 



THE NEW POLITICS 

find themselves confronted with the questions 
which had already long beset older and more 
crowded countries. That period is not yet ex- 
hausted ; but the pace of our American advance 
has been accelerated. I think we can hardly 
doubt that certain new public issues which within 
the last two or three years have come very swiftly 
to the front are such as both Mr. Bryce in 1888 
and Macaulay in 1829 foresaw that we should 
ultimately have to face ; that they have come to 
stay ; that the present time is therefore transi- 
tional — much more truly so than many periods 
which have seemed so mainly because they have 
been disturbed and exciting. We are not yet, it 
is true, an old society or a crowded country. But 
— the frontier is gone. With the admission of 
Arizona and New Mexico, the famous Senate 
Committee on Territories becomes a committee 
on Alaska alone. We are in the situation of a 
man who, though still very young, has neverthe- 
less reached maturity and come into full posses- 
sion of his estate; of an estate vast, indeed, — 
vaster than that of any of his neighbors, — but 
yet of a vastness no longer incalculable, no longer 

7 



THE NEW POLITICS 

uncalculated, and which is also appreciably im- 
paired by the waste and extravagance of his youth. 
We face, therefore, the duties and responsibilities 
of maturity, of a more careful development and 
husbandry of our great demesne. The time of 
boundless anticipation is past. We have, instead, 
a sure sense of strength, but with it comes also, 
at last, the sense that even our strength, and our 
capacity for growth, have their limits. There is 
as yet no real pinch, no hemming in, no severe 
pressure or congestion ; far from it. But the cer- 
tainty that these things are in the future is at last 
borne in upon us by facts and by wise warnings. 
That is enough, like the young man's first vivid 
confrontment with the mere knowledge of his 
limitations, to change our mood. Were we asked 
if our characteristic cheerfulness and hopefulness 
is not damped, we might still reply, " Not a jot, 
not a jot ! " But we are indisputably taking up, 
and ought to be taking up, certain of the prob- 
lems of " old societies and crowded countries'*; 
and the coming of these new problems, these 
new issues, has somewhat changed the aspect of 
certain others which, even with us, are old. 

8 



THE NEW POLITICS 

There is much to hearten us as we enter 
upon the new epoch. As we turn to the questions, 
new and old, which now confront us, we can feel 
that certain other questions, certain whole classes 
of questions, in fact, which have at other times 
sorely tried free governments, do not now confront 
us at all. There are, for instance, the political 
troubles which have sprung from differences in 
religion — the very bitterest in history. It surely 
may be counted an immense triumph of democ- 
racy that these have for us practically ceased to 
exist. And it is so, too, with certain other funda- 
mental things. Besides religious freedom, we have 
freedom of speech and of the press. Some very 
serious evils have, it is true, appeared in the press. 
It is badly commercialized. Its tone is frequently 
very low, and one does not, as a rule, find it gov- 
erned by any high sense of responsibility. But it 
is still, as a whole, an invaluable safeguard. What- 
ever problems we have to face, we can discuss them 
with very great freedom. We obey Milton's in- 
junction concerning Truth : " Give her but room, 
and do not bind her when she sleeps." In that 
alone is an immeasurable security and hope. To 

9 



THE NEW POLITICS 

say that we are also free from the political troubles 
and perplexities that spring from differences of 
race would be going too far. But I think we 
may say that those troubles and perplexities are 
to-day less acute, less threatening, less hampering 
and depressing, than they have ever been before. 
The sin and blunder of slavery is ended — is even, 
let us hope, atoned for. The mistake and wrong 
of Reconstruction is undone. Much, very much, 
remains to be done by way of adjustment, arrange- 
ment, education, justice ; but the temper in which 
we consider these things is vastly improved. I 
believe that most thoughtful men, if they should 
examine their own minds concerning this entire 
matter, would confess themselves more hopeful 
to-day than they have ever been — more hopeful 
than, a few decades ago, it seemed possible that 
they would ever be. 

We can, therefore, turn to our new issues ex- 
ceptionally free-handed, and with the good spirit 
that comes of substantial progress in free govern- 
ment. 

The new issues all have this much in com- 
mon : They are all at bottom economic, and eco- 

10 



THE NEW POLITICS 

nomic in a very strict derivative sense of the word 
— all questions of national housekeeping, of the 
safeguarding, the development, and the distribu- 
tion of our immense national inheritance. John 
Sherman said long ago that nine tenths of the 
legislation of peace is the legislation of finance, 
and if finance be taken in its fullest meaning, that 
is truer to-day than when he said it. I am not 
sure that it has not also always been true; but 
the rapid and revolutionary development of the 
means, and the swift widening of the scale, of 
production and transportation — the marvelous ex- 
tension of the principle of combination into every 
branch of industry and business — this change 
has transformed bewilderingly the entire field 
with which economic legislation must deal. It is 
not merely that we are approaching " the prob- 
lems of old societies and crowded countries.'* 
Those problems have taken on for us new as- 
pects, aspects hardly known elsewhere, and a 
truly American vastness of range. We can and 
should profit by a close study of European and 
Asiatic experience. The way we are at last com- 
ing to study that experience is perhaps the most 

II 



THE NEW POLITICS 

convincing, as it is the most natural, manifesta- 
tion of our changing temper. But the guidance 
we can get from the older countries, however 
valuable, is limited. There are things we must 
work out for ourselves — in which we must our- 
selves be guides and pioneers ; for the new indus- 
try, the new ways in business and finance, are 
much further advanced with us, and much more 
firmly established, than with the older peoples. 
The particular new issue on which we can get 
the most guidance from Europe, and which is 
therefore the simplest of all, is that of conserva- 
tion. To call that issue a question would be a 
misnomer. It is not a question at all — unless 
there is a question between economy and extrav- 
agance. To state it should be, so far as public 
opinion is concerned, to answer it. No one, I 
suppose, would have the hardihood to affirm that 
we ought to waste our patrimony instead of hus- 
banding it, or that we ought to consume those 
natural resources which, like the forests and the 
soil's energy, are capable of self-maintenance and 
of increase, faster than they can be restored. The 
only question should be of ways and means, and 

12 



THE NEW POLITICS 

concerning these it will be some time before we 
exhaust the enlightenment to be got from Euro- 
pean experience. The very recent date of the 
beginnings of scientific forestry among us is per- 
haps the best illustration of how much we can 
learn and must learn from that experience — and 
of how amazingly we have neglected it. It is 
hardly twenty years since Mr. Pinchot and the 
other pioneers began their work in this country ; 
but in Germany, in France, in Switzerland, the 
care and culture of the forests have been a na- 
tional concern for centuries. Their systems were 
thorough and elaborate before ours was begun. 
The German forests are valued at half a billion 
dollars. The French forests yield annually an aver- 
age of two dollars the acre. Those of Switzerland 
are, if anything, even more carefully conserved 
and cultivated. With us, there was actually no 
law whatever providing for forest reservations 
until 1 89 1. In the matter of the national con- 
servation of the use of water-power, we have in the 
example of Switzerland a still more admirable 
— a practically perfect — object-lesson. There 
is not a considerable waterfall in the Alps whose 

13 



THE NEW POLITICS 

force is not carefully calculated. Already a great 
part of the light and heat and power used by 
the Swiss people is supplied by Government from 
this source. 

Concerning these things, therefore, there is 
hardly a question ; but there is an issue ; there 
is a conflict, a struggle ; and the violence and 
magnitude and difficulty of it are greater than 
anywhere else in the world. That is so because 
nowhere else in the world are private interests 
so well organized or so powerful, and nowhere 
else have they had such opportunities to acquire 
control of the various means of wealth. There 
is thus an issue, more and more sharply defined, 
between the permanent public weal and the self- 
ishness of individuals and groups. The mere waste- 
fulness of the public itself, culpable as it has, of 
course, been, does not seriously threaten to turn 
into that spoliation by the people which Macau- 
lay apprehended; but the accumulation of vast 
wealth by a few, which he also predicted, — that 
has come, and on a scale beyond his wildest 
dream. There has also come a massing together 
of both great and little accumulations, and an 

14 



THE NEW POLITICS 

organization of capital and industry under a few 
heads, which he apparently did not foresee at all, 
so that the struggle is not so much against the 
appetites and immediate desires of the mass of 
the people as it is a struggle on behalf of the 
people against the combinations. To take an in- 
stance which at once suggests itself, the lumber 
kings were not so slow as the rest of us to see 
how rapidly the country was being deforested. 
Mr. Pinchot did not need to take violent meas- 
ures to arouse them to the situation. Mr. Pinchot, 
in fact, taught them nothing on the subject. 
They had already looked ahead, and were buying 
timber lands everywhere. Whether or not a sim- 
ilar concerted effort has been made to monopolize 
the country's water-power has been questioned ; 
but it can hardly be questioned that, law and 
usage remaining what they are, the same forces 
which have made for monopoly and against com- 
petition in other things — in steel, in mineral oil, 
in anthracite coal, and the rest — will accomplish 
this huge monopoly as well. 

The swift and universal rise of prices from 
which we now suffer will be really a blessing 

15 



THE NEW POLITICS 

if it shall serve to awaken us completely to the 
actual state of industry and exchange among us. 
Our awakening to the necessity of economy, of 
conservation, important as it is in itself, is still 
but a part of the greater awakening to the true 
extent of the changes that have come about in 
our industrial life ; it is but a rubbing of the 
eyes to what we shall see when we are fully 
aroused. The field is so vast that only a superfi- 
cial glance at the main features of the new order 
is here possible ; but sometimes the swift eye- 
sweep will yield enlightenment not to be won 
by a minute and piece-meal observation. 

The most striking and important fact — a fact 
which is in a way inclusive of the whole mat- 
ter — is this: Competition, as we have known 
it in the past, the kind of competition on whose 
existence and continuance our law and usage 
concerning industry and concerning property are 
largely based, is breaking down. From many 
industries it has already practically disappeared. 
Take any one of dozens of articles of general 
consumption, and thorough investigation will 
very likely disclose that real and vital competi- 

i6 



THE NEW POLITICS 

tion no longer prevails in its production or in 
its transportation or in its wholesale or even its 
retail distribution. From whomsoever one buys 
it, one is really patronizing a trust or other com- 
bination. A combination of manufacturers makes 
it, a combination of common carriers fixes the 
charges for transporting it to the market, the 
original combination names the terms on which 
the retail dealers may handle it, — the main con- 
dition frequently being that they shall not handle 
competing products at all, — and the ultimate 
consumer is lucky if a combination of the deal- 
ers themselves does not fix the minimum price 
at which he can buy it. That such combinations 
of mere retailers exist in the great centers, and 
that there exists also the control or ownership 
of groups and chains of shops by the manufac- 
turers themselves, has for some time been known. 
If our present investigations of prices go deep 
enough and far enough, I am sure they will also 
disclose such combinations in the smaller com- 
munities as well. The dependence of ordinary 
shopkeepers on the trusts or other combinations 
which supply their particular wares — such, for 

17 



THE NEW POLITICS 

instance, as that of the butchers on the meat 
trust— is so widespread that in this respect the 
old law of competition has been, in large measure, 
not merely nullified but reversed. Instead of in- 
dividual manufacturers competing for sales to 
individual shopkeepers, who in turn compete 
among themselves for the consumers' favor, we 
have the shopkeepers compelled to restrict their 
business to the products of a group of manufac- 
turers and taking their revenge by themselves 
combining against the consumer. The consum- 
ers, in fact, seem to be the only industrial group 
which has so far failed altogether to combine. 

Illustrations are so abundant that one hesitates 
which to choose. Perhaps the tobacco business, 
since it was one of the first to yield to the prin- 
ciple of combination, will do as well as any 
other; but what is true of that business is true 
of so many others that it is necessary, in justice, 
to emphasize that it is taken merely as an illus- 
tration — that nothing invidious is meant by the 
choice. 

The history of that business since the principle 
of combination, the trust principle, was first ap- 

i8 



THE NEW POLITICS 

plied to it, exhibits plainly all the features of the 
new order which have been mentioned, except, 
possibly, the voluntary combination of the retail 
dealers in particular communities. There was first 
practically unlimited competition among the man- 
ufacturers, then the union of several companies 
in a corporation stronger than any of its rivals; 
then the sort of competition that never lasts, and 
which led simply to successive absorptions of all 
sorts of independent concerns by the original 
combination, the names of the various independ- 
ent brands being, however, frequently retained ; 
then the invasion by the trust of branches of the 
business in which it had not originally engaged ; 
then — or perhaps sooner — the taking of meas- 
ures for the control of the retail trade, such as 
the setting-up of chain stores and the practical 
compelling of retail dealers to handle only the 
trust's wares. Other means to overcome compe- 
tition were doubtless employed, but these were 
the chief. And they have been so effective as to 
leave the consumer in large measure at the mercy 
of the combination. If he insists on buying a 
particular brand of tobacco formerly manufac- 

19 



y 



THE NEW POLITICS 

tured by independents, he is very likely to find 
either that it is no longer manufactured at all or 
that it is now really manufactured by the trust 
— in which case the quality of the product has 
very probably been changed. Of course, some 
independent concerns are still doing business, and 
it is always possible to obtain their wares if the 
consumer prefers them and is willing to take the 
trouble to use the mails. The monopoly is not 
complete. But in respect of by far the greater 
part of the demand for tobacco in all its various 
forms, it has almost come to the point where the 
men in control of the bulk of the business can 
say to the consumer: "You can no longer choose 
for yourself what you will have. You must take 
what we supply." 

Again let me repeat that I have mentioned 
this business merely as an illustration. Many other 
industries that would serve equally well as illus- 
trations instantly come to mind. In fact, what 
does not come promptly to mind, what is getting 
harder and harder to find, is the industry, the 
business, of which what is true of this one is not 
either already true or plainly by way of becoming 

20 



THE NEW POLITICS 

true. One can scarcely pick up a paper without 
encountering the announcement that the same 
principle has been extended in some form to 
some new field. A combination of "general" 
stores in certain cities, and a practically nation- 
wide combination of bakeries, are the freshest in- 
stances. It is impossible not to feel that the ten- 
dency is so universal as to mean unmistakably a 
new industrial order. 

What does the change mean for the individual, 
not as consumer, not as in any sense a mere ob- 
server or outsider, for that can be the lot only of 
a number so small as to be negligible, but as a 
part and member, an industrial unit, of the new 
order, the new system ? Clearly, it means, and it 
must continue to mean until the system is some- 
what modified in the interest of the individual, 
less independence, a narrower range of opportun- 
ity. There is no reason to believe that it means, 
on the whole, less comfort or a lowered standard 
of living. The contrary is more probably true. 
The economies in most of the combinations 
doubtless outnumber and outweigh the losses, not 
from the point of view of the producers only, 

21 



THE NEW POLITICS 

but from that of the entire community as well. 
Neither does the change mean that the man 
of ability and ambition cannot rise. He can. A 
policy of promotions for merit is plainly to the 
interest of every great business. The great com- 
binations have almost universally adopted that 
policy, and they follow it far more consistently 
than Government does. That is a principal rea- 
son why they are so well served.^' But that these 
; things are so does not rid us of the fact that the 
~ coming of the new order has meant a real loss 
of independence, of industrial freedom, to the 
great mass of individuals. Their chance to rise is 
a chance to rise in but one way — by obedience 
to the laws of the systems to which they belong; 
and in the making of those laws they have had 
no voice. There is real independence only at the 
top ; and to reach the top is beyond the hopes of 
any but a very, very few. In this respect the new 
order is, perhaps, more like the military system 
than anything else. Clearly, it is less democratic, 
less in accord with the democratic ideal, less 
conducive to the democratic spirit and temper, 
than the old. 



22 



THE NEW POLITICS 

But to get a fuller conception of the change, 
and how great it is, we must go higher. We 
must go to the source of initiative and control in 
business as it has come to be carried on in Amer- 
ica; that is to say, to the men who direct the 
capital of the country. For the principle of com- 
bination has certainly not withheld itself from 
the sources of industrial energy any more than it 
has from particular industries. Of the announce- 
ments of mergers and combines which one sees 
so constantly, none are more significant than 
those concerning banks and trust companies in 
the great centers. To these there have also of 
late been added reports from the West of the 
formation of chains of banks in the smaller 
places, covering whole States or parts of two or 
three States — not the branch bank arrangement 
of England and Canada, but veritable bank trusts, 
controlling the main supply of capital for great 
regions. I suppose it was the insurance investi- 
gations of a few years ago that first revealed how 
it has been possible for a few great capitalists to 
get control of the accumulated savings of hun- 
dreds of thousands of people of small means. 

23 



THE NEW POLITICS 

Those investigations did not, however, lead to any 
comprehensive plan for arresting the process. It 
has not stopped, but gone on. According to a 
recent estimate, a single great banking concern is 
charged with the practical direction of some six 
billion dollars, variously invested — in manufac- 
tures, in banking, in transportation, in mines, in 
many other ways. To say that we already have 
a dominant, all-controlling money trust would 
be going too far. But it is not too much to say 
that the forces of the age make for such a consum- 
mation, that, our law and usage remaining as 
they are, that also is fairly sure to come about. 
^ The possibility, taken with the vastness of our 
extent and our wealth, is staggering. Four cen- 
turies ago, the Medici were masters of Florence 
because they were supreme there in finance; but 
Florence at her best was but a city of perhaps one 
hundred thousand inhabitants, with a territory 
far smaller than that of our average single State. 
If, therefore, the Medici could make themselves 
so great a place in history, and play so great a 
part in the life of their time, what might not 
they do who should establish even a like control 

24 



THE NEW POLITICS 

over the limitless industry, the incalculable opu- 
lence, of America? In the presence of such power 
how could democracy survive ? Such power could 
go far to corrupt the press. Less power has, in 
fact, already gone far to corrupt the press. Less 
power has already corrupted legislatures ; has sub- 
orned executives; has reached even the courts. But 
these indirect and vile ways are not the only ways, 
perhaps not the most truly effective ways, in 
which such power would work to the undoing of 
democracy. When we shall have substituted the 
new order for the old regime of competition and 
free individual initiative in all the great industries, 
when every one of them shall be organized into 
a single system under a single-headed control, and 
there shall be set above them all the money- 
lenders, the financiers, themselves brought into 
an equal solidarity, we shall have gone far to de- 
prive democracy of the very air which it must 
breathe to live. We shall have denied to the 
mass of individuals the use and practice of self- 
dependence, self-direction, the wont and exercise 
and habit of freedom, without which they cannot 
fit themselves either to win it or preserve it. 

25 '&^- 



y 



:^ 



THE NEW POLITICS 

Here, I repeat, is but the merest glance at the 
new conditions ; the merest flirting aside of the 
curtain. But it may, I think, be sufficient to en- 
able us to formulate the chief of the new issues. 
We are confronted, let us say, with the problem 
of adapting the democratic principle to condi- 
tions that did not exist when our American de- 
mocracy arose in the world : that is to say, to a 
field no longer unlimited, to opportunities no 
longer boundless, and to an industrial order in 
which competition is no longer the controlling 
principle, an industrial order which is, therefore, 
no longer democratic, but increasingly oligarchi- 
cal, which may even become, in a way, monarch- 
ical, dynastic. To save itself politically, democ- 
racy must therefore become aggressively industrial; 
it must somehow extend itself into that field. 
Plainly, therefore, "laissez-faire" can no longer 
be its watchword. That was the watchword of 
the regime of competition. Democracy's task is 
twofold; it must secure for the State, the public, 
the people, some kind of effective, ultimate con- 
trol over the natural sources of all wealth ; and it 
must also secure, in an industrial system no longer 

26 



THE NEW POLITICS 

controlled by competition, protection and oppor- 
tunity for the individual. / 

That twofold task and battle will not be easy. 
Democracy, in fact, has never faced a harder, a 
more complicated struggle. Ere she come through 
it victorious, she will have need to call upon the 
names of all her saints, to hearten herself with 
the memories of the deeds of all her heroes. For 
privilege, driven from the Church, hurled from 
the throne, has here in America made her seat 
and stronghold in the market-place, and fortified 
it with such a skill and energy as were never be- 
fore spent in her service. We may hope that if 
it be taken it will prove her last. But we cannot 
feel that it will be easily taken; we cannot even 
hope to take it by the methods of our past fight- 
ing against oppression. 

That ancient warfare must, in fact, be begun 
all over again, and with new tactics, new strat- 
egy. In the presence of the overshadowing new 
issue, many of the old issues will be altered, re- 
shaped. The old struggle over the tariff will be 
less and less a mere matter of conflicting sectional 
issues, less and less a matter of contrary economic 

27 



THE NEW POLITICS 

theories, more and more a part and phase of the 
great struggle between democracy and privilege in 
industry. The old constitutional questions, many 
of which we have fondly thought forever settled, 
will reappear in new forms, and many new ones 
will also arise. Instead of being at the end of the 
period of great constitutional controversies, we 
are at the beginning of a new set of such contro- 
versies, deeper and more difficult than any that 
have come before. The rights and powers both 
of the States and the Nation must be scrutinized 
afresh. We shall be lucky, indeed, if we can stop 
with mere constitutional decisions and adaptations 
and changes. Before the end, we may well have to 
go back farther still, and find for the common law 
itself, if not new principles, at any rate, new for- 
mulas. For I doubt if we shall end before we 
have revised many of what we have thought our 
fundamental conceptions of property and of hu- 
man rights. 

I doubt, indeed, if democracy alone is in dan- 
ger, if democracy alone is the sole matter of the 
argument, the true stake of the contest. They that 
enlist in the new war, though they begin as de- 

28 



THE NEW POLITICS 

fenders of democracy only, may find before the 
end that they are in truth fighting in a still 
holier cause and can take their inspiration from 
a still greater name. Liberty, to save herself and 
all her immemorial winnings, must come herself 
into the field. And she cannot come as when, in 
the past, she has come to lift up peoples abased 
by kingly or aristocratic oppression or crushed by 
armies or yoked with the yoke of priestly big- 
otry. Coming now to lift up a people bowed 
down before the face of wealth, she must take on 
a new aspect, cry new invocations, learn new ways 
of warfare. She must get new weapons and a new 
armor. It may even be that she must wear a 
new face and form, and find for herself some 
other beauty than that with which, for so many 
ages, she has won to her hard service the noblest 
of mankind. '^ 



THE NEW POLITICS 



II 

PARTIES AND MEN 

None of us are entirely content with our po- 
litical parties as they are. A good many of us 
hardly ever mention them except to abuse them. 
But only one prominent American, Mr. W. R. 
Hearst, has of late years made any persistent ef- 
fort to get rid of the old ones and substitute new; 
and he does not seem to have had any great suc- 
cess. No one has seriously proposed that we try 
to get on without any parties whatsoever. Parties 
of some sort are the only device we have for 
making our Government work. We can deal with 
the issues presented by the new politics only 
through parties; through the old ones if they do 
not divide too hopelessly when they come to face 
those issues ; through new ones if they do. In any 
case, however, we shall at least begin with the 
old parties. 

I will repeat the statement I have made of 
what seems to me the present task of democracy 
in America, the problem presented by the new 

30 



THE NEW POLITICS 

order which has come about in industry and busi- 
ness almost simultaneously with the final coming 
of the Republic into a sense of the limitations of 
its material resources. The present task and prob- 
lem of democracy is twofold : to secure for the 
State, the people, some effective ultimate control 
over the natural sources of all wealth ; and to se- 
cure, in an industrial system no longer controlled 
by competition, protection and opportunity for 
the individual. 

The contest now forced upon us is, of course, 
but another form or phase of the immemorial 
struggle with privilege. But the phase of that 
struggle upon which we are now entering may, I 
think, be not unreasonably considered the most 
important, the most crucial of all. And for this 
reason: The kind of privilege with which we 
must now join battle is the product, not of mon- 
archy or aristocracy or priestcraft, but of democ- 
racy itself. It has grown up out of a free soil. The 
new organization of industry into great combina- 
tions, which has gone so far toward crushing out 
competition, began itself in the freest competi- 
tion; it was in fact accomolished through the 

31 



THE NEW POLITICS 

methods of competition. First competition, then 
absorption — that has been the process. But for 
the freedom which our laws and usage allowed, 

— the free play they gave to all kinds of ability, 
the opportunity they opened to all kinds of talent, 

— it is doubtful if these tremendous aggregations 
of energy and wealth and system could have been 
built up so swiftly. Certainly, no country where 
the older forms of privilege prevail has ever 
matched them. Being, therefore, products of a 
society established in opposition to the entire con- 
ception of privilege, they may seem to prove that 
there is something in the very nature of great hu- 
man societies which makes for privilege — that 
there is something, perhaps, in human nature 
that makes for it. But whatever the fundamental 
trouble, the root of the evil, may be, it is not en- 
tirely unreasonable to hope that this time, since we 
are dealing with a kind of privilege native to de- 
mocracy itself, we may eventually get at it. What 
I mean is that we may eventually find our strug- 
gle turning into a warfare with the very life prin- 
ciple of privilege; that it may, therefore, prove to 
be the final war — the last of the long series that 

32 



THE NEW POLITICS 

began either with the first raising-up of the head 
of authority in some pristine democracy or else 
with the first glimpse of the face of freedom in 
some original despotism. 

That, of course, is a long, long hope; and these 
are large and bold conceptions. To pass from 
them to a study of our Democratic and Republi- 
can parties of to-day is rather an anticlimax — like 
turning from Burke or Milton to the newspapers. 
But I know no other way to be practical. y 

The tendency in all self-governing or partly self- 
governing societies is to have at least one party 
which is distinctly, at any rate habitually, the party 
of privilege and at least one party which is habit- 
ually opposed to privilege. There may be other 
parties, advocating special causes. One or the 
other of the two great parties may from time to 
time split and divide on particular issues. They 
may both from time to time fall into inconsist- 
encies, failing to adhere to their essential motives 
and life principles. All sorts of departures and 
variations occur. But this remains the normal di- 
vision and alignment. One may prefer, with Mr. 
Bryce, to call one party the party of order and 

33 



THE NEW POLITICS 

authority and the other the party of progress. But 
the choice of words is not particularly important. 
The general character of the division is fairly 
well indicated by either set of terms. 

I have elsewhere ventured to argue that Mr. 
Bryce and De Tocqueville, and other foreign ob- 
servers as well, have erred in denying that the two 
great American parties have stood, on the whole, 
for this normal party division, and I still hold that 
opinion. But I admit freely that none of our par- 
ties has stuck steadfastly to its proper role. Apart 
from the forces that ordinarily make against con- 
sistency in politics, the federal form of our Gov- 
ernment has been the cause of a long series of 
divisions — divisions over the powers of the States 
and of the Nation — -that have often obscured the 
more universal division. Now and then these old 
questions — questions of state rights and federal 
powers — reappear. But they have lost their heat. 
They have lost much of their interest. There is 
something academic about all the present-day 
discussions of them. I think it is clear that they 
now play a far less important part than they used 
to play in our politics, and have much less effect 

34 



THE NEW POLITICS 

than formerly on our party divisions. These may, 
therefore, be expected to follow hereafter more 
closely than they have hitherto followed the gen- 
eral usage of parties in representative govern- 
ments. One will stand rather more distinctly than 
formerly for order, authority, system, effective- 
ness; and that will be the party through which 
privilege will most naturally seek protection and 
extension. The other will rather more distinctly 
than formerly stand for democratic aspiration, for 
the rights and the hopes of the individual, for 
equality of opportunity ; and that will be the party 
which on the whole will offer the most antago- 
nism to privilege. 

But of the two great parties now in existence, 
which will be which? 

Until quite recently, I do not think many of 
us would have hesitated on this point. Although 
the Republican party began as the party of free- 
dom, of manhood rights, and in opposition to one 
of the worst forms of privilege that ever existed, 
the institution of slavery, I think most of us would 
have said that in its later history it has been pretty 
distinctly the party of order and authority in this 

35 



THE NEW POLITICS 

country, and therefore the party to which privi- 
lege would most naturally look for favor and 
protection. It has had that character for several 
reasons. It has had a majority of the wealthy in 
its ranks, and it has naturally been more respon- 
sive to their views than its rival. It is the party to 
which people who have had, as the saying is, a 
stake in the country have naturally gravitated ; and 
one potent reason for their coming into it has 
been its long ascendancy, the long lease of power 
which the country granted it after the Civil War. 
It has had control of the Government. Strong, 
successful, practical men have turned to it because 
it could do things, and men of that character have 
become its ruling spirits. Great interests of all 
kinds have attached themselves to it. As it gradu- 
ally committed itself to the policy of protection, 
those who profited or hoped to profit by that 
policy became inseparably attached to it. As the 
issues which it was formed to meet disappeared, its 
character changed. It became more and more the 
champion of the great interests which filled its cam- 
paign chest and demanded in return the legislation 
they wanted. A more thoroughly business-like 

36 



THE NEW POLITICS 

party never existed. It has for decades commanded 
the best practical ability in the country. As our 
industrial system altered, when first the great cor- 
porations were formed, and then the trusts, until 
from many fields competition disappeared, noth- 
ing was more natural than that the men at the 
head of the great combinations should find this 
party sympathetic. They were the same kind of 
men, not infrequently they were the same men, 
who were already dominant in its councils. Both 
from its composition and from its association with 
great business interests, the Republican party was 
apparently certain to become the political repre- 
sentative of the new order; the representative of 
power; the representative of wealth; the represent- 
ative of combination as opposed to competition, 
of cooperation and coordination and system as 
opposed to individualism; the party, therefore, 
of privilege — of the new kind of privilege. 

Certainly, its rival was not well fitted for that 
role. The Democratic party had, it is true, at a 
certain time in its history, stood for a great special 
interest. The long lease of power which it en- 
joyed before the Civil War had the usual effect 

37 



THE NEW POLITICS 

of power on a party of liberal principles. It grew 
more complacent with things it had come into 
existence to oppose and less fiery for the ideas it 
had come into existence to advance. It became 
more complacent with authority, less fiery for lib- 
erty. The genuinely democratic impulse which 
it had received in Jefferson's time and again in 
Jackson's had no renewal under Polk and Pierce 
and Buchanan. While it was in this state the 
slavery issue came to dominate all others ; and both 
the old parties divided over it. The Whig party 
went to pieces. Among the Democrats, the South- 
ern or pro-slavery faction got the upper hand and 
kept it until the disruption of 1 8 60. Unfortunately, 
two truly democratic principles, the principle of 
individual liberty and the principle of local self- 
government, both thoroughly sound withinreason- 
able limits, had been brought, by the anomalous 
fact of slavery in a republic, into a kind of conflict. 
The distracted party held to the principle of local 
freedom, of state rights, and abandoned the prin- 
ciple of individual liberty, of the rights of man. 
The slavery interest, the very greatest single inter- 
est in the country, for a time controlled it. For a 

38 



THE NEW POLITICS 

time, therefore, it may be said to have been the 
party of the established order, the party of privi- 
lege. 

But for the last half-century the Democratic 
party has had very little of the power that corrupts 
and demoralizes. Neither has it had the kind of 
membership that would make it complacent with 
privilege, nor yet have the great material interests 
attached themselves to it. It has, indeed, from 
time to time won as recruits independent men of 
wealth ; but its principal gains have been among 
the working-people of the great cities, particularly 
among the foreign-born and among the plain 
farmers of the West. The old slaveholding in- 
terest of the South has, of course, disappeared, and 
the large Southern membership of the party has 
had, since the war, an influence on its policy very 
different from that which the slave interest exer- 
cised before the war. For the South has been poor ; 
it has been relatively weak ; it has felt itself on the 
defensive ; on the outside of things and not on the 
inside. In the South, moreover, the plain man, the 
man with neither wealth nor distinction of birth, 
has been steadily coming to the front. The old 

39 



\ 



THE NEW POLITICS 

Southern aristocracy has lost its political ascend- 
ancy, and the new industrial oligarchy has been 
slower to develop there than elsewhere. The 
voice of the South in that party has accordingly 
been, since the war, the race issue alone apart, de- 
cidedly against any kind of condoning of privi- 
lege. 

On the whole, therefore, I think we may say 
that as the new issues began to force themselves 
upon the country, as the great changes in our in- 
dustrial system came about, and the new kind of 
privilege began to make itself felt and understood, 
it was decidedly the Democratic party to which 
one had best reason to look for opposition to that 
new kind of privilege. That was the party which 
seemed, on the whole, to have decidedly the best 
right to claim support as the party of individual 
liberty, of democracy in the full meaning of the 
word. 

And that, I think, has been its real bent. For 
the past ten years its specific proposals have been, 
for the most part, unfortunate. It has suffered 
also from bad management, from bad organiza- 
tion, from factional divisions. It has suffered from 

40 



THE NEW POLITICS 

lack of intelligence. As contrasted with the 
business-like control and direction of the Repub- 
lican organization, its leadership has been pitia- 
bly weak. The party has been distrusted, and the 
people have refused to grant it power, because 
they have felt it to be incoherent, unbusiness-like, 
ineffective, more like a mob than an army — but 
not because it has not been democratic in animus 
and temper and composition. For years, in fact, 
it has wanted only able and intelligent leader- 
ship and firm organization to commend it to popu- 
lar favor. A majority of the American electorate 
would many times have preferred to support that 
party if they had not been afraid to. 

Such, then, was the general state of both parties 
when the new aspect of industry and finance 
forced itself upon the attention of the people in 
a way to demand a distinctly political attention. 
Then two things happened which have profoundly 
altered the party situation. One was Mr. Roose- 
velt's promulgation of what have come to be 
called the Roosevelt policies. The other was the 
Progressive or Insurgent movement in the Re- 
publican party. 

41 



THE NEW POLITICS 

The two things were certainly not unrelated. 
Which began first will doubtless in the future be 
discussed by historians, but to determine whether 
ex-President Roosevelt really got his cue from 
the Western Progressives or they got theirs from 
him is not of the first importance. Both he and 
they had come to feel that to retain the confi- 
dence of the country their party must somehow 
counteract the impression, already widespread, 
that it was subservient to great private and cor- 
porate interests; that it must, therefore, strike 
out on a new line and consider more candidly the 
changed conditions of industry. Both he and they 
had vision enough to see that there was growing 
up and becoming powerful in this country a kind 
of discontent somewhat different from that which 
has produced most of the revolutions and politi- 
cal overturns of the past; a discontent not so much 
with actual as with relative material conditions, 
not so much with actual suffering or poverty as 
with inequalities, and particularly inequalities of 
opportunity. 

The fact and the volume of that discontent in 
America is a striking and a creditable thing. Many 

42 



THE NEW POLITICS 

of our people who are most dissatisfied are living 
fairly comfortable lives. They do not lack bread 
or shelter. They have w^ork, and their earnings 
seem, as compared with the earnings of the same 
kinds of labor in other countries, decidedly high. 
But they see other men enjoying not merely 
greater wealth, but a kind of power which they 
themselves cannot hope to attain. They perceive 
that they are mere parts of systems, the control 
of which has passed to a few men ; that these sys- 
tems are growing constantly bigger and absorbing 
more and more of the industrial energy of the 
country; that it is, therefore, no longer reasona- 
ble, as it once was, for every man of character and 
intelligence and energy to hope to make himself 
the independent master of his own business, what- 
ever it may be. Instead of that, they find all the 
main industries, including the various forms of 
commerce, tending to combination and consoli- 
dation, with a very small group in control, and 
the workers of all but the highest grade or rank 
deprived completely of initiative, and indeed re- 
duced to be mere parts of a great machine, value- 
less and powerless if detached. Of course this 

43 



THE NEW POLITICS 

change has caused some actual hardship. But the 
discontent with it has been something more than a 
mere clamor for a bigger share of the good things 
of life. The democratic instinct, the instinct and 
principle of individualism, of independence, of 
human rights, has been at the bottom of it. That 
instinct has taken alarm, and the alarm has spread 
through both the parties. The reason why this 
feeling has had more striking and visible effects in 
the Republican party than in the opposition has 
been that it had more to overcome in that party 
than in the opposition. 

-• Whether we give the credit for originality in 
this matter, for first perceiving the coming on of 
a new democratic impulse, to ex-President Roose- 
velt or to the Western Progressives, whether we 
consider that he acted as patriot and leader and 
prophet or only as an astute politician, there can 
be no denying that his political instinct was keen 
and correct. But ex-President Roosevelt, when he 
went out of office, had merely announced a gen- 
eral policy concerning the combinations and had 
done little more than that concerning the conser- 
vation of our resources. And even in his very 

44 



THE NEW POLITICS 

general announcements of policy he on one point 
either differed from the Western Progressives or 
at least failed to go their lengths. He made no at- 
tack on the system of high protective tariffs. He 
failed, therefore, to strike at all at that particular 
bond between his party and the great interests 
which many have regarded as the least defensible 
of all. The Western Progressives did strike at it, 
and it was that part of their programme which, 
as we all know, brought them first into open con- 
flict with the conservative wing of their party. 

That conflict has now widened and deepened 
into a positive breach or schism which cuts through 
the party everywhere except, perhaps, in the South. 
The division has, for the time being, altered the 
face of American politics, and it has upset all cal- 
culations and forecasts. 

To attempt a forecast even of the course of the 
schism itself would be venturesome. But either 
the Progressives or the Conservatives will win, let 
us say, in their present fight for control inside the 
lines of the party lines. If the Progressives win, 
the party will be profoundly changed. But in that 
case the chances are at least even that the Conserv- 

45 



THE NEW POLITICS 

atives will not withdraw ; they may feel that they 
have no other place to go ; and if they remain in 
the party their presence will be enough to keep it 
from becoming radical — to keep it from becom- 
ing more than moderately liberal. If, however, 
the Conservatives win, the Progressives are not so 
likely to acquiesce and remain loyal. On the con- 
trary, there is a very strong probability that they 
will secede; that they will either attempt a new 
movement and organization of their own or join 
with the present opposition or some part of it. 
It is a question, therefore, whether they or the 
present Democratic opposition will be the true 
liberal party of the future ; but to that liberal 
party of the future, whatever form and name it 
may take, both the Progressive Republicans and 
the present opposition will contribute of their 
membership ; and, on the other hand, we may be 
sure that wherever, in the new alignment, the 
Conservative Republicans, the so-called "Stand- 
patters," the men who for some decades have been 
the real rulers of this country — that wherever 
these shall find themselves, there will be the party 
of authority and order, the party of the new kind 

46 



THE NEW POLITICS 

of privilege. To them will doubtless be joined 
many conservative men, Tories in temperament or 
by conviction or from the character of their per- 
sonal interests, who now call themselves Demo- 
crats. The composition of the two parties of the 
future seems in fact fairly easy to predict. 

But whether they will be two new parties, with 
new names, or merely the two old parties materially 
changed in composition and much more sharply 
differentiated in policy than they now are — that 
depends on the character and the effectiveness of 
the leadership of the immediate future. A leader 
of the Republican Progressives comparable to 
Hamilton or Jefferson or Lincoln could in all 
probability make of them a true and complete 
party, so strong that a great part of the opposition 
would in the long run be drawn into its ranks. 
The rise of such a man among the Democrats 
would, on the other hand, probably have a pre- 
cisely contrary effect. 

There are people, many people, who feel that 
the Republican Progressives already have such a 
man. There are also people, though not so many, 
who would contend that the opposition has such 

47 



THE NEW POLITICS 

a man ; and the claims of this sort that are made 
for Bryan are as sincere as those that are made for 
Roosevelt. But they are not at present taken so 
seriously. It is said that Mr. Bryan has been for 
years proclaiming the issues and advancing the 
ideas which are now transforming our politics ; 
that he was in this respect far in advance of 
Roosevelt. This is measurably true. There are de- 
mands in the Progressive programme, there are 
"planks" in Roosevelt'sOssawatomie "platform," 
which were urged by Mr. Bryan before the terms 
*f Progressive " and "Insurgent" came into use, 
before Roosevelt became President and announced 
his policies. But along with these things Mr. 
Bryan has put forth other ideas, other proposals, 
which have been utterly and deservedly rejected; 
and he has supported them with a kind of reason- 
ing which many of us find not merely shallow and 
unconvincing, but culpably sophistical. Whatever 
sincerities and whatever soundness there may be in 
him, a great body of thoughtful and sober-minded 
Americans, many of them members of his own 
party, are fixed in the conviction not merely that 
he is an untrained mind, a mind lacking in judg- 

48 



THE NEW POLITICS 

ment as well as training, but that he is too unsta- 
ble to be trusted with power. It is hardly con- 
ceivable that his prestige and his hold on public 
opinion will ever be greater than they have been. 
They are now less than they have been ; and they 
seem likely to continue to diminish. 

With Roosevelt it is different — very different. 
He still fills the public eye as no other man of the 
time has done. Apparently, his going out of office 
has not lessened at all the interest in his personality 
and his career or at all narrowed his extraordinary 
access to public opinion. It is many years since any 
American has had so great a fame as his or such 
obvious and widespread influence. Every public 
utterance he makes reaches the entire country. 
He can have an instant hearing for any proposal, 
any contention, he cares to put before the Repub- 
lic. Moreover, he plainly desires to continue to 
lead. He seeks to put himself at the head of the 
Progressive Republicans ; and all the signs are that 
the majority of the Progressive Republicans wish 
him for their leader. When, therefore, it is asked, 
why he is not the man of the hour, the man of the 
age, the man providentially raised up to be the 

49 



THE NEW POLITICS 

captain of all the forces of democracy in the war- 
fare against the new kind of privilege, a convinc- 
ing answer does not at once frame itself. 

He will not fail to play that role from any lack 
of energy or of shrewdness or of the instinct for 
affairs — the instinct of leadership. No more skill- 
ful politician, in the fall and not invidious sense of 
that much-abused word, has ever lived in this Re- 
public, if in any republic. It is by no means pre- 
posterous to compare him with either Cassar or 
Napoleon if one has in mind only their civil and 
not their military characters and careers. Neither 
in revolutionary France nor in the overgrown 
and decadent Roman Republic could such a man 
have been kept down. His detractors merely 
hurt their case when they refuse to acknowledge 
the uncommon force there is in him. In face 
of his actual performance in self-advancement, it 
is difficult to doubt that he possesses "the thews 
that throw the world." Perhaps it is true that 
he has no particular gift or power which can 
properly be called genius; that he has won his 
battles solely by an extraordinary use and develop- 
ment of gifts not extraordinary in themselves. But 

SO 



THE NEW POLITICS 

that does not leave him any the less extraordinary 
in the actual effect. Such will and energy are them- 
selves as rare as genius — and far surer to prevail. It 
is they, in truth, that make the conqueror as we 
know him in history ; and that is plainly the type 
to which Roosevelt belongs. His sleepless ambi- 
tion and ever-growing egoism are entirely in 
keeping with it. The frail body disciplined to 
robust strength and hardihood, the student and 
idealist turned into the ultra-practical man of af- 
fairs, the halting speaker and writer become a mo- 
nopolist of public utterance, the appetite for action 
and for power, once aroused, growing ever with 
what it feeds on, until it is become insatiable — 
what is all this but the normal course and develop- 
ment of the character that all through history has 
belonged to the setters-up of dynasties, the regene- 
rators or overthrowers of kingdoms, the founders 
or the subverters of republics .? 

Fairness will concede extraordinary attraction 
as well as extraordinary force. There have been ad- 
mirable, even noble, impulses, the gift of com- 
radeship; zest in human relationships, and love of 
nature, and joy in life; integrity in private deal- 

51 



THE NEW POLITICS 

ings,and continence, and domestic virtues. There 
has been, of course, courage always, and an in- 
spiring sense of opportunity and of the range and 
possibilities of life. There has been a ceaseless in- 
tellectual activity, never, it is true, particularly fine 
or original, but keen and quick and wide of reach, 
playing over the entire field of human interests. It 
is a personality that can win as well as overcome. 

Yet I cannot feel, and I do not believe that many 
dispassionate and painstaking observers of this 
career can feel, that here is the right leader of our 
American democracy in its present crisis. Many, 
on the contrary, are coming to feel that in precisely 
such a man there may be more immediate danger 
to the American democratic ideal than even in 
those new industrial forces against which his 
leadership is invoked. It is becoming a common- 
place that those forces and our present industrial 
conditions were not contemplated when our system 
was founded ; that the fathers did not foresee them 
and could not, therefore, set up safeguards against 
them. But the fathers were not without fore- 
thought of the danger of the coming of such a man 
as is now risen up among us — a man too popular, 

52 



THE NEW POLITICS 

too powerful, and too ambitious. It is clear from 
their debates that they had in mind both the mis- 
adventures and the preventive usage of the ancient 
and mediaeval republics, in every one of which 
there dwelt a constant terror of the man too long 
in power and in the public eye, the man with too 
great a following, the man too preeminent above 
his fellows. It was of the essence of the spirit of the 
ancient republics, as it was of the spirit of repub- 
lican Florence, not to expect to find the virtue and 
forbearance of their great men equal to their 
strength, and to refuse, therefore, to risk the safety 
of the State upon the doubtful hazard of the con- 
flict of ambition and patriotism in any human 
breast. Our own founders limited the term for 
which a President could be elected to four years, 
and they also undoubtedly intended the device of 
an electoral college to operate as a check upon 
popular impulse. That device failed. But when 
Washington retired at the end of his second term 
his example was quickly seized upon and con- 
verted into a precedent — a precedent which has 
hitherto proved strong enough to keep any of his 
successors from serving longer than he did. 

53 



THE NEW POLITICS 

That precedent has undoubtedly had great 
weight with the electorate, but it has also had the 
effect of an admonition and an appeal to Wash- 
ington's successors themselves ; and to not one of 
these has it ever appealed so logically as it does 
today to Theodore Roosevelt. All that I have said 
and all that can be said, in praise of his character 
and his achievement, merely makes it so much the 
more applicable to his case. For the kind of dan- 
ger contemplated in the apprehension which has 
made that precedent so effective could not come 
from a weak man, but only from a strong man ; 
it could not come from an unpopular man or a 
man generally distrusted, but only from a man 
grown too popular, a man trusted too widely and 
too slavishly. Of course, too, the man to be feared 
must be ambitious, and that Roosevelt has from 
first to last been keenly ambitious even his ad- 
mirers do not deny. He has proved himself not 
merely ambitious, but of an imperious and arro- 
gant impatience with whatever hinders or stays 
him, whether it comes from men or from laws. 
With men he has again and again displayed, now 
a tyrannous and coarse violence, now an indirec- 

54 



THE NEW POLITICS 

tion and sharp practice, which simply cannot be 
condoned. However one considers such things as 
his dealings with Quay and Piatt and Harriman, 
or his brutal fury with his critics of the press and 
with Judge Parker and other political rivals, or 
his entire behavior concerning campaign contri- 
butions in 1904, or the bullying and unfairness 
with which he has repeatedly met opposition, one's 
republican instincts and one's instincts as a gentle- 
man are equally outraged. With laws he has been 
even more high-handed than with men. From 
first to last he has been egregiously lacking in 
that scrupulous and reverent sense of law, of prec- 
edents, of institutions, which has been hitherto 
the rule of both American and English statesman- 
ship, and none of his public utterances shows the 
lack of that sense more glaringly than his recent 
setting forth of the " New Nationalism." Of all 
his predecessors in the White House only Andrew 
Jackson can be compared to him in this respect. 
And Jackson, demoralizing as his "reign" was, 
never was half so really dangerous. For Jackson 
had no such consuming ambition, no such sweep- 
ing designs of change; and when he came into 

55 



THE NEW POLITICS 

national power he was already elderly and infirm. 
Should Roosevelt again take the first place in the 
Republic, no one would expect to see him con- 
duct himself as an ordinary President in time of 
peace. His power would be greater than Jackson's 
at its height ; and there is every reason to believe 
and none to doubt that he would wield it with a 
worse than Jacksonian disregard of legal and con- 
stitutional limitations. 

One may have the firmest faith in our system 
and still shrink from submitting it to such a strain. 
No doubt, Lord Morley's observation in " Com- 
promise'* is sound: a reasonably healthy state has 
immense strength ; it has abundant reserves of vi- 
tality to throw off disease and recover from shocks 
and confusions and derangements of its order. But 
every departure from its right order, every lapse 
from its essential principles, leaves it more open 
to the next, I do not believe that Roosevelt, I 
do not believe that Napoleon or Caesar, could 
in a day or a generation subvert the institutions 
of this country; but not for that reason ought 
a Napoleon or a Caesar to be welcomed ; and not 
for that reason should any intelligent Ameri- 

S6 



THE NEW POLITICS 

can disregard the danger that there is in Roose- 
velt. 

Clearly, unmistakably, the precedent we have 
made from Washington's example is apposite, 
applicable. The v^arning of it comes home. It 
warns us against him. But may we not hope that 
also, since he also is an American, since we need 
not believe that he does not really love his coun- 
try, it will in time, and potently, warn him against 
himself? That he will yet, and in time, take to 
heart some of the words forever on his lips, and 
read aright the lives he has so often commended 
to us — Timoleon's, Hampden's, Washington's, 
Lincoln's ? That he will learn at last the supreme 
nobleness, rise to the supreme opportunity, of 
self-abnegation? That the ideals of youth will 
yet revive in him and conquer the coarser 
impulses of manhood? That he will yet, and in 

time, — 

'' Curb the liberal hand, subservient proudly " ? 

By no conceivable self-assertion could he now 

render to his country such a service as it is open to 

him to render by crucifying his own ambition; 

and in no other way could he make his own fame 

57 



THE NEW POLITICS 

so secure. Nor would the act cut him off from 
such service, such leadership, as would in truth be 
most truly valuable to the country and most hon- 
orable to him. Let him once pledge himself in 
plain words never again to seek or to take the pres- 
idency, and his power to advance causes, his hold 
on public opinion, his opportunity to contribute 
what he has to contribute to the solution of the 
new problems, would not be less, but greater. If, 
however, he will not do that, his leadership, so far 
from helping us with our new perplexities, will 
merely complicate them with the old problem 
and danger which from time to time has beset 
every experiment in republican government — 
the problem and danger of " the man on horse- 
back." 

We shall proceed better, because more safely, 
more in accord with the spirit of our own and the 
English law and usage and institutions, with less 
risk of either destroying what we have or estab- 
lishing what we shall have to destroy, if we go on 
without recourse to anything at all in the nature 
of a dictatorship. Our emergency is not of the 
character that demands such a remedy ; nor could 

J8 



THE NEW POLITICS 

such a remedy work us any lasting good. Our need 
is of a permanent adjustment to conditions likely 
to endure; of laws thoroughly considered and 
carefully framed; of deep-reaching changes in 
our social habit and usage — such changes as can 
only be brought about slowly, with a wise pa- 
tience. For work like that such a temper as 
Roosevelt's would be almost the worst conceiv- 
able. That of his successor, though less inspiring, 
is far better. But it is doubtful if any one man's 
leadership will bring us far upon our road. For 
the long and hard enterprise now before democ- 
racy in this country the best abilities of many 
men will be needed, and those abilities will need 
the best training to be got from schools and col- 
leges and from life and experience. There must 
be an extraordinary cooperation, a difficult and 
unprecedented bending of countless energies, in 
many fields, to the same general and impersonal 
ends. Ordinary popular leadership will not suf- 
fice; from the one-man power in whatever form, 
from masterful and swift determinations of what- 
ever kind, we have little to hope. American poli- 
tics are become a hard occupation. The Republic 

59 



THE NEW POLITICS 

has never before demanded a more serious and 
patient attention to its affairs, or from so many 
men. For, whatever the changes that shall in the 
end make our system valid and firm against the new- 
conditions, they must extend through the whole 
of it, in all its federal vastness. The test to which 
our public opinion and our great electorate are 
thus submitted is no less than this: that there 
must be a widespread, an intelligent, and a stub- 
born patriotism. 

The demand of the Republic for many men 
who shall be not merely patriotic, but of a high 
intelligence and highly trained, who shall com- 
bine common honesty with shrewdness and in- 
sight, is indeed severe. And for the difficult serv- 
ice demanded the reward may not be high. It 
may well be martyrdom instead of gratitude; to 
be misunderstood rather than to be honored; to 
be used and then cast aside. 

But the immemorial promptings to nobleness 
abide. It is, after all, service and not self-seeking 
which oftenest in the end prevails. Though many 
men who seek only their own advancement or 
their own profit in this country's affairs win to 

60 



THE NEW POLITICS 

their goals and have their low desire, they and their 
works pass swiftly. 

" In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake." 

They who, on the other hand, give themselves 
sincerely to the common service — and they, too, 
are many, for it is not for nothing that we have 
been so long a free people in a favored land — will 
find that what they have wrought will stand; that 
it has been as if some gracious and tutelary power 
guided their hands to noble and enduring work- 
manship. They will find — as good men always 
find in the end — that they have builded better 
than they knew. 
1910. 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT 
AMERICA 

THE tone and spirit of American writing about 
America is much better than it used to be. 
As our foreign critics have ceased to be supercili- 
ous, we ourselves, it would seem, have ceased to be 
vainglorious. Here beside me are some half-dozen 
volumes of essays, lectures, and studies, all by- 
Americans, all about the Republic, all fresh from 
the press. ^ In not one of them does the Eagle 
scream. Not one of the writers even claims that 
our great experiment of democracy is yet proved 
successful. None of them, it is true, are really pessi- 
mistic. A note of discouragement here and there is 
the worst one finds. But all acknowledge frankly 
the disappointments in our past, all face candidly 

1 Yale Lectures on the *' Responsibilities of Citizenship " : The Citi' 
Zen's Part in Government, by Elihu Root; Four Aspects of Civic Duty, 
by William Howard Taft; True and False Democracy, by Nicholas 
Murray Butler; Standards of Public Morality, by Arthur Twining Had- 
ley; American Legislatures and Legislative Methods, by Paul S. Reinsch; 
The Spirit of the American Government, by J. Allen Smith; The Indus- 
trial Republic : a Study of the America of Ten Tears Hence, by Upton 
Sinclair. 

6s 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

the perplexities of our present; only one claims 
with confidence to have penetrated the clouds that 
shut out the future. 

The writers are for the most part men entitled 
to a respectful attention. One is of the small group 
from which, in all human probability, we shall 
choose the next President. Another, his colleague 
in the Cabinet, many of us would pronounce the 
best mind in the Government, if not in our entire 
public life. Of the two. Secretary Root shows, I 
think, much the better literary instinct. Consid- 
ered merely as serious prose about great topics, 
his addresses invite comparison with the writings 
of English rather than American public men, of 
whom so very few make a good appearance in 
print. Now and then, there is a kind of quiet 
depth of meaning in his sentences that actually re- 
minds one a little of Lincoln. Secretary Taft has 
not such a gift; but he achieves a detachment, an 
air of thoughtful, disinterested concern about pub- 
lic affairs, as of an honest, well-bred gentleman, 
which one too often misses in the utterances of 
even our highest public officials. 

Two presidents and two professors of universi- 

66 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

ties maintain the usual large proportion of aca- 
demic contribution to this as to all other topics 
about which books can be written. As it happens, 
both Secretary Taft and Secretary Root have taken 
occasion to point out the limitations of the aca- 
demic point of view concerning affairs. Accord- 
ing to the former, it has too great " certainty and 
severity"; and Secretary Root, while setting the 
highest value on the public schools as opening the 
door to opportunity and service, admits a doubt 
"whether the higher academic education contrib- 
utes much to capacity for political usefulness." 
But the presidents of our greater unversities be- 
come perforce men of affairs, however academic 
their ideals and training may be. President Butler 
seems in far greater danger of error from oratori- 
cal fervor and rhetorical facility than from any 
timid preciseness of scholarship. President Hadley 
has more of the academic quality in his style, and 
what may be a bit of New England acerbity as 
well ; but his point of view is almost irreverently 
practical, common-sense, contemporaneous. And 
even to the mere professor, the mere scholar, how- 
ever we may bow and smile him out of court when 

67 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

he begins to philosophize, we must concede a cer- 
tain competency for investigations of facts, such 
as Professor Reinsch has made in his study of 
American legislatures, and such as constitutes the 
main part of Professor Smith's study of the Con- 
stitution. 

The last writer of our group, Mr. Upton Sin- 
clair, is a socialist ; he is also, it must be confessed, a 
decidedly sensational novelist. But in the company 
of two statesmen and four academic dignitaries we 
may venture, perhaps, to let him also say his say. 

It is but just, indeed, that he or some other 
socialist should have a word; for hardly one of the 
others is content to leave socialism entirely alone. 
So much, at least, the socialist propaganda has ac- 
complished ; conservative publicists, however they 
may reprobate it, do not treat it as negligible. Nor 
is their reprobation so stFongly tinctured as it once 
was with contempt. Secretary Taft is, it is true, 
contemptuous of the mere "parlor socialist," for 
whom, in fact, he reserves his most scornful word ; 
but he will not deny sympathy to the socialistic 
impulse of men who have really suffered under 
our present economic arrangements. President 

68 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

Butler concedes to the propaganda both sincerity 
and abiHty, and is content with the refutation, 
effective perhaps, but rather worn, that socialism 
is an illogical attempt " to overcome man's indi- 
vidual imperfections by adding them together." 
Secretary Root ends a remarkable sentence, de- 
scriptive of the dangers which beset on either side 
the true course of popular government, by con- 
trasting " the dreams of Utopia, to be realized by 
changing everything," with " the reverence for the 
past that is horrified by changing anything " ; and 
later on, summing up the grounds of hopefulness, 
he takes comfort in the diminishing proportion 
of avowed socialists in the American labor unions. 
On the whole, what is most striking in nearly 
all these animadversions on the Republic is the 
entirely serious way in which the writers address 
themselves, not perhaps to socialism itself, but to 
that aspect of American life which is most pro- 
vocative of socialistic remonstrance. Were a so- 
cialist to read them all together, as I have done, he 
might well be tempted to quote them Kipling : — 

" Nor call too loud on Freedom, 
To cloak your weariness." 

69 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

For all have much to say of liberty. But it is a far 
cry from the kind of defense of liberty which they 
offer to the old defiances of kings and aristocra- 
cies with which we Americans began. Here is not 
a word, in fact, concerning tyranny of the old- 
fashioned sort. On the contrary, here is more than 
one vigorous assertion of the utter distinction, the 
contrast and incompatibility, indeed, between lib- 
erty and equality. Secretary Root's declaration 
has been celebrated journalistically as extraor- 
dinary and as courageous. " After many years of 
struggle for the right of equality," he remarks, 
"there is some reason to think that mankind is 
now entering upon a struggle for the right of in- 
equality." The phrasing is uncommonly good, 
but the contention is far from extraordinary: 
the commitment would hardly seem bold if the 
speaker were not a public man and an office- 
holder. On the contrary, this is the main thesis 
of President Butler in more than one of his pa- 
pers,, and he keeps iterating it as if he were dis- 
content because he cannot find words violent 
enough to arouse us all to its axiomatic truth and 
its vital importance. Clearness on this point, he 

70 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

urges, is the essential distinction between a true 
and a false conception of democracy. "We must 
put behind us the fundamental fallacy that equal- 
ity is demanded by justice. The contrary is the 
case. Justice demands inequality as a condition 
of liberty and as a means of rewarding each ac- 
cording to his merits and deserts." And again: 
"The corner-stone of democracy is natural in- 
equality, its ideal the selection of the most fit." 
The thought tempts to epigrammatic over- 
emphasis in the statement; and no doubt we 
Americans have often fallen into a slipshod neg- 
lect of such distinctions among ideals which, not 
long ago, we were disposed to consider peculiarly 
our own. To emphasize this particular distinction, 
even to over-emphasize it, may be a good way to 
get rid of whatever there may still be left in us of 
the old hazy bigotry. But are we not again be- 
fooling ourselves if we fancy the distinction a dis- 
covery, or if we try to make it broader and harder 
and faster than in truth it is ? President Butler, for 
instance, takes too little pains to point out that 
the equality he is contemning is equality of eco- 
nomic condition, not of privilege. He does not 

71 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

pause long enough to consider fully the claim that 
the denial of equality of industrial opportunity 
may utterly defeat that very ideal of liberty which 
he holds up to us as the essential and the summum 
bonum of democracy. On this point, his oratorical 
approach to the problem leaves him — and even 
Secretary Root may be a little open to the same 
criticism — decidedly at a disadvantage as com- 
pared vi^ith the least distinguished of our group. 
Professor Smith's deliberate account of the 
founding of our government, mainly a searching- 
out of the old intrenchments of privilege in the 
Constitution, has led him on to a more care- 
ful qualification of his statements. The American 
doctrine of liberty, he points out, had its origin in 
economic conditions quite unlike those of to-day. 
It was in fact based on the assumption of equality 
of economic opportunity; and under the old in- 
dustrial system of apprenticeship and private ini- 
tiative, before the days of machinery and cor- 
porations, a practical equality of opportunity did 
in fact exist. If, therefore, as socialists claim, and 
as we all know to be in great measure true, the 
coming-in of machinery and the concentration 

72 ■ 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

of capital in a few hands have destroyed equality 
of industrial opportunity, the principle of liberty 
would seem to be in need of a new application. 

And Professor Smith thus works his way to 
what seems the most valuable generalization I 
have found in any of these writers. When the 
masses were economically independent and sub- 
stantially equal, he argues, the aristocracy, the 
powerful few, — dominant politically in America 
as everywhere else at the time of our beginnings, 
— could maintain their place and power only by 
keeping hold of political privilege and making 
the State all-powerful. The doctrine of "laissez 
faire " was, accordingly, the right creed of the 
masses at that time, — the time, that is to say, of 
Rousseau and Adam Smith and Thomas Jeffer- 
son. They did not need the help of the State to 
protect themselves economically ; on the contrary, 
they had good reason to fear that the State, con- 
sidered as a merely political machine, over which 
they had little control, might be used by the aris- 
tocracy to deprive them of their economic inde- 
pendence. To-day, the situation is reversed. With 
the gradual attainment of universal suffrage the 

73 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

people have got control of the State ; but mean- 
while they have been losing control of the means 
and appliances of industry, they have been losing 
their economic independence. The parties to the 
old controversy have accordingly changed sides. 
It is the wealthy and privileged few who now cry, 
" Laissez faire ! " It is the unprivileged many who 
desire more and more governmental interference 
with industry. What was once the radical plat- 
form is become the conservative, and what was 
once the conservative is become the radical. 

It is a generalization which I think many sin- 
cerely liberal minds, opposed to privilege, but con- 
firmed in the habit of associating privilege with 
the entire theory of a strong and paternal govern- 
ment, may come to welcome. It is firmer ground, 
one feels, than the footing of Secretary Taft when, 
before an audience of Yale undergraduates, he tries 
to explain how experience has modified the rigid- 
ity of the laissez-faire notions which he imbibed 
when he himself was a Yale undergraduate and his 
father a member of the Cabinet. " I think these 
principles," the Secretary explains, "are still or- 
thodox and still sound, if only the application of 

74 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

them is not carried to such an extreme as really to 
interfere with the public welfare.** The longer 
one looks at the explanation, the more clearly one 
perceives that laissez-faire doctrines are true pre- 
cisely so far as they are true, — and the more 
strongly one is reminded of the classical advice of 
the Honorable Preserved Doe, in the " Biglow 
Papers," — 

*' Aginooine statesman should be on his guard, 
Ef he must hev beliefs, nut to b'lieve 'em tu hard." 

One can't help wondering if Professor William 
Graham Sumner was in that audience; for it seems 
probable that Secretary Taft had in mind not so 
much the newer questions of government control 
of the great corporations as a very old question, 
over which the battle of laissez faire has been 
fought many times before. When the issue is on 
the tariff, it is still the unfavored many who pos- 
sess that war-cry, still the favored few who im- 
portune Government for help. Two years ago. 
Secretary Taft spoke in a way to indicate that he 
held clear views about protectionism, and did not 
fear to express them. That he should now, both in 
this little book and in more recent utterances, give 

7S 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

forth an uncertain sound on that issue, must prove 
a grave disappointment to many who have ac- 
counted themselves his well-wishers, to all who 
have been led to regard him as of the school of 
courage and candor in public life. 

And here, too, if I mistake not, lies the plainest 
falling-short of the present administration in the 
eyes of its more disinterested supporters. Six years 
ago. President McKinley, "regular" Republican 
though he was, and while parties could demand 
regularity far more imperiously than they can to- 
day, said at Buffalo, in his last public speech, "The 
period of exclusiveness is past. The expansion of 
our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. 
Commercial wars are unprofitable. A policy of 
good will and kindly trade relations will prevent 
reprisals. Reciprocity treaties are in harmony with 
the times, measures of retaliation are not." 

Theodore Roosevelt, who entered public life 
a tariff reformer, and who so long remained, and 
measurably still remains, the hope of independent 
and manly men inside and outside his party, sol- 
emnly promised, while McKinley lay unburied, to 
endeavor to carry out his policies. For six years we 

76 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

have waited in vain for President Roosevelt to 
affirm or to controvert the last and on the whole 
the most important announcement of policy Presi- 
dent McKinley ever made. He has never moved 
in that matter, nor has he ever explained why he 
does not move. And now, as his administration ap- 
proaches its end, the man whom he would have us 
take for his successor will go no further than to de- 
clare for tariffrevision — after the election ! That, 
of course, means, after the election of a Republi- 
can President and Congress. It means, therefore, 
revision by a House of Representatives under the 
control of Speaker Cannon, and a Senate under 
the guidance of Senator Aldrich. Will the Amer- 
ican people be content to vote upon the issue in 
that form ? 

Mid-ocean should be a good place for broad and 
placid views of human affairs, and I happen to be 
writing at sea. But it happens also that I find on 
board ship an illustration of the actual working of 
our present tariff laws which well-nigh counter- 
acts the sea's great soothing. Down in the hold 
are several thousand tons of American steel billets. 
They will be sold in England cheaper than they 

17 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

can be bought in America. Nor is this an excep- 
tional incident ; such cargoes are the rule. The last 
time we discussed the tariff, protectionists did not 
predict and did not defend this process of " dump- 
ing." Since then, writers like Mr. Edward Stan- 
wood have, I believe, accepted it as an outcome of 
extreme protectionism, and defended it as a relief 
to an occasionally glutted home market. But has 
anyone ever defended such juggling with the laws 
of trade as a regular practice ? Certain it is that the 
American electorate has never approved it. Prob- 
ably the mass of voters do not yet understand that 
our protected manufacturers are actually making 
a profit on goods sold in England cheaper than at 
home, and in competition for the home market of 
those very foreigners against whom we are taxed 
to protect them. The voters have not, in fact, had 
a chance to consider at all this new phase of our 
tariff policy. 

For that, however, we cannot blame the party 
in power. The opposition has had all along, of 
course, the right to bring the question before the 
people, and every general election for the past ten 
years or more has presented an opportunity. But 

78 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

this weapon of attack has lain unused in the Demo- 
cratic arsenal. Meanwhile Mr. Bryan (not to be 
outdone, are we to suppose, in astuteness by the 
other side ?) proposes to make government owner- 
ship of the railways the issue — but also, after the 
election ! The tariff is again, as it would have been 
in 1900 or in 1904, but even more plainly, the 
best fighting ground of the opposition. It is to be 
remembered that, as a matter of simple fact, they 
have never lost when they have forced and kept 
that issue before the people. But the opposition, 
apparently, has no memory. Failing a new leader- 
ship, which must mean a new leader. Democratic 
stupidity bids fair, once again, to equal or surpass 
the measure of Republican culpability. 

Does this heat seem political — even partisan? 
But so much is pertinent, I think, to the line of 
discussion which all these writers follow. For all 
turn, in some fashion, to the endless theme of privi- 
lege, to the still unsolved problem of economic 
justice as an ideal of the state. With nearly all, this 
is the main theme — and in what sincere and dis- 
interested writing about affairs is it not the main 
theme ? I think, as I have said, that it is superficial, 

79 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

almost archaic, to write as if the last word were said 
about democracy when one has set liberty over 
against equality. But neither is that eagerness wis- 
dom which, rushing to attack the newer positions 
of privilege, such as are challenged in our more 
recent legislation for the hampering of trusts by 
fuller control of railroads and other means of trans- 
portation, raises the siege of an older stronghold. 
Essentially the same power and process which 
manipulate railroads to the ends of monopoly — 
a concentration of the selfishness of wealth — piled 
up, and to the same end, that extraordinary tariff 
wall which now, while it shuts out the foreign 
producer, lest he lower prices among us, leaves our 
own manufacturers free to serve free-trade Eng- 
land far more cheaply than they will serve their 
countrymen at home. 

But it is well, of course, to take account broadly 
of all the aspects of privilege in the Republic, to 
consider candidly all the advantages which wealth, 
by an utterly unexampled facility in aggregation 
and combination, has contrived to win. Wealth is 
not, it is true, the only form of privilege in Amer- 
ica. There is the privilege of race, to go no further ; 

80 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

but none of our writers is dealing with the case of 
the negro, the red man, the Asiatic. Moreover, 
the problems of that class, although vastly mo- 
mentous and unspeakably difficult, are yet of a 
range something less than universal ; they are also, 
I am persuaded, of an at least relatively diminished 
and diminishing importance. The struggle for 
ideals, for justice, is in the main and usually either 
a fight with overweening wealth or a leashing 
and beating-back from anarchy of the discontents 
and envies that spring from real or comparative 
poverty. Of course, therefore, the struggle in 
America is but part of a universal contention, and 
is distinct and peculiar only by reason of our dem- 
ocratic and federal form, and whatever else there 
is in our life to set us apart from other modern 
peoples. 

Perhaps it should be accounted one of the pe- 
culiarities of our case that wealth cannot here, as 
in older countries, grace and ingratiate itself with 
claims of blood, with high traditions of conduct, 
with the records and memorials of historic sacri- 
fices and heroisms. If we must admit that there is 
nowhere else so great a mass of wealth, so easily 

8i 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

combined, to be reckoned with, at any rate it must 
also be said that nowhere else does wealth thrust 
itself so crudely before the vision. Nowhere else 
does so little of sentiment or reverence help to 
fight its battles. Nowhere else is its predaceous- 
ness so plainly greed. 

The consideration is not negligible. England is 
to-day, as we all know, in many respects quite as 
democratic as America ; but whereas, even before 
our independence was achieved, and even in aris- 
tocratic Virginia, Jefferson could strike down the 
entire system of entails, it survives to this day in 
the mother country. Because the English people 
hold in real honor the great families whose names 
are forever associated with noble passages in their 
history, the greater part of the land of England 
cannot be bought, but passes on, generation after 
generation, from eldest son to eldest son, no mat- 
ter how improvident its possessors. That the sys- 
tem works a continuing hardship to farmers whom 
it prevents from becoming landowners is patent. 
That we have been so long exempt from it is a 
true instance of our exceptional free-handedness 
in the struggle for that reasonable equality of op- 

82 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

portunity which I think we must account essential 
to the attainment of the substance of liberty. 

Why, then, has wealth so great weight and 
power in our system? Taking it for granted, of 
course, that greed will in America forever play 
upon whatever weaknesses of universal human na- 
ture it elsewhere suborns, what, if any, are the 
more peculiar means which it may here make use 
of? In what concrete ways does it successfully 
combat our American ideals of liberty and inde- 
pendence, fair play, justice? To be more specific, 
what is the fault or weakness in this our American 
plan of government ? Is it possible to strike one's 
finger on the spot? Or is the sickness general, 
spreading throughout all our veins and members ? 

This, it would seem, must be, of necessity, the 
main present inquiry about the Republic. It is 
true, as one of our writers is at much pains to show, 
that we began by deliberately granting to privilege 
what was thought a firm footing in our funda- 
mental law, national and state ; that our founders, 
for the most part, held this to be wisdom, and the 
only way to insure us stability. But their theory is 
long since abandoned, and the particular fortifica- 

83 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

tions of privilege which they erected — such as 
property qualifications for the suffrage and for of- 
fice — are nearly all long since swept away. Such 
dominance as wealth has now in our system 
may be regarded as a new kind of dominance, 
and exercised by a new kind — or degree — of 
wealth. 

Where, then, is the breach ? Nothing is more in- 
teresting, in the comparison of our several writers' 
views, than the almost unanimity of their answers 
to this question, so far as they definitely consider 
it. The Executive in our system has, they seem 
to agree, justified all the reasonable hopes of the 
founders. In State and Nation alike, the Chief 
Executive is, as a rule, a fairly true representative 
of the people's interests, at any rate of the people's 
will. The old fears that he would turn usurper, 
and suborn courts and legislatures to his ambition, 
have proved quite mistaken. Now and then a Gov- 
ernor, less often a President (Andrew Jackson is al- 
most the sole instance), has been, for a little while, 
successfully imperious. But the Executive Depart- 
ment has not in the long run gained in power at 
the expense of the others. On the contrary, it has 

84 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

had much ado to hold its own. Quite as rare are 
the instances of proved corruption or faithless- 
ness. Nor have the courts either unduly enlarged 
their function or betrayed their trust. It is v^ith 
the legislatures that fault is found. 

It is the legislatures, and particularly the na- 
tional Congress, v^^hich have proved most rapacious 
of power and shown the strongest disposition to 
encroach upon the powers of other departments. 
"Ever since the Civil War,*' President Butler de- 
clares, " Congress has steadily invaded the province 
of the President." It has likewise, as he and Presi- 
dent Hadley point out, thrust itself into the prov- 
ince of the courts; but in the nature of things this 
invasion could not go so far as in the case of the 
Executive. 

Secretary Taft puts it with his habitual mild- 
ness. So far from the Executive's usurping legis- 
lative functions, "the tendency," he remarks, "is 
exactly the other way. The danger that the Ex- 
ecutive will ever exceed his authority is much less 
than the danger that the legislature will exceed its 
jurisdiction." And he points out that, since the 
legislature holds the purse-strings, the President is 

8s 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

always "a petitioner at the door of Congress for 
the means to carry on the Government." 

President Hadley is not given to mildness, par- 
ticularly v^^ith legislatures. "The legislature," he 
says, " not only fails of its primary purpose in mak- 
ing the right kind of laws, but perverts its sec- 
ondary purpose by exercising the wrong kind of 
checks upon the Administration. A representative 
can exact a price for his support of the Adminis- 
tration in a matter of public interest, and the more 
the public interest is concerned in the passage of 
the measure, the higher the price he can charge." 
And both he and Professor Reinsch dwell upon the 
tendency of all our legislatures to multiply laws 
on every subject that can be thought within their 
jurisdiction; a tendency which has forced the 
courts, although at first inclined to be timid, to a 
freer and freer exercise of their right to pronounce 
statutes unconstitutional, and which has led the 
States to impose, by constitutional conventions, 
countless new limitations upon the activity of 
their lawmakers. 

President Butler goes back to Madison for a 
rather cautious prediction of what has happened. 

86 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

He would have done better to take this striking 

prophecy of Gouverneur Morris, in a letter to a 

correspondent who asked a question about the 

Constitution : — 

That instrument was written by the fingers which write 
this letter. Having rejected redundant and equivocal 
terms, I believed it to be as clear as our language would 
permit ; excepting, nevertheless, a part of what relates 
to the judiciary. But, after all, what does it signify that 
men should have a written Constitution, containing un- 
equivocal provisions and limitations ? The legislative lion 
will not be entangled in the meshes of a logical net. The 
legislature will always make the power which it wishes 
to exercise, unless it be so organized as to contain within 
itself the sufficient check. Attempts to restrain it from 
outrage, by other means, will only render it more out- 
rageous. Having sworn to exercise the powers granted, 
according to their true intent and meaning, they will, 
when they feel a desire to go farther, avoid the shame 
if not the guilt of perjury, by swearing the true intent 
and meaning to be, according to their comprehension, 
that which suits their purpose.' 

And it is the legislatures which have proved 
most pliable to the demands of privilege, of wealth. 
On this point there is no dissent. " It is to the com- 
mittee rooms and the floors of the legislatures," 

* Gouverneur Morris to Timothy Pickering. Sparks* s Life of Gou- 
verneur Morris y vol. iii, p. 3 2 3 . I am indebted to two friends, Mr. T. H. 
Clark and Mr. W. C. Ford, of the Library of Congress, for this quotation. 

87 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

President Butler declares, " that private interests 
go for help or protection. There responsibility 
is so divided, there secrecy is so easy, that meas- 
ures demanded by the people are done to death, 
despite the urging of national and state Execu- 
tives. As matters stand to-day. States and syndi- 
cates have Senators, districts and local interests 
have Representatives, but the whole people of the 
United States have only the President to speak for 
them, and to do their v^ill." Secretary Taft is again 
the mildest. All he will say is, "I do not mean to 
deny that at times private and special interests do, 
in fact, exercise an influence to the extent of de- 
feating needed legislation." But he agrees with 
the others that the chief reason for this, as for the 
general failure of the legislatures to be rightly rep- 
resentative, lies in the control which particular 
States and other electoral districts exercise over 
members. " Particularism " is, I suppose, our only 
word for this phenomenon. Professor Reinsch 
lays much stress upon it, but President Hadley has 
given it the most attention and goes at the great- 
est length into the analysis of it and the setting- 
forth of its consequences. 

88 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

The upshot of his analysis is that, with com- 
paratively rare exceptions, the old theory that 
every legislator represents the whole country or the 
whole State, as the case may be, is practically 
abandoned. The theory now would seem to be that 
it is enough if each merely looks after the inter- 
ests of his own district. Nowhere in the legisla- 
tures is there clearly placed any responsibility for 
the welfare of the entire body politic, and no- 
where (since we have not the English device of a 
responsible cabinet) is the responsibility clearly 
placed for the entire body of legislation enacted by a 
particular Congress or general assembly of a State. 

By two steps. President Hadley reaches the 
practical outcome. " If a man is chosen President 
to govern the country as a whole, and if a number 
of men are sent to Congress to see that the coun- 
try is not governed as a whole, but with a view to 
the interests of the separate parts, there is a per- 
petual threat of a deadlock." That means, accord- 
ing to the writer's conviction, — which is not, 
however, fully announced in this book, — the fail- 
ure of representative government. The second 
step is logical, if surprising. "But the country 

89 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

must be governed, and somebody must be found 
to do it. The President may not do it. That 
stands in the Constitution. Congress may not. 
That also stands in the Constitution. The only 
man left to do it under present conditions is the 
party boss. If a man gets the power to control 
nominations both for the executive and the legis- 
lature, he can furnish government of the kind he 
wants, either good or bad." 

Here, no doubt, is an instance of the academi- 
cal too great " certainty and severity " of reason- 
ing about affairs. An overstrained major premise 
is made to yield an inference at once too broad 
and too precise. In practice, the instinct of com- 
promise is far too strong, and compromise too po- 
tent a resource, to permit of anything like a con- 
stant and complete deadlock between legislature 
and executive. Both yield much, and together 
they so often contrive, without other help, to carry 
on the government, that the boss is neither omni- 
present nor, when he exists, omnipotent. Never- 
theless, one does recognize the physiognomy thus 
so candidly traced as a kind of composite portrait 
of representative government in America. 

90 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

We shall not easily agree upon any statement 
of the extent of the evil. Sincere men will vary 
all the way from Secretary Taft's mere acknowl- 
edgment that there is something the matter to the 
journalese of Mr. Lincoln Steffens, — "govern- 
ment of the people, by the rascals, for the rich." 
But the evil stands confessed, proved, explained, 
— and few of us would deny that it is of great 
enough proportions to make us all ashamed. 

Naturally, it is the Socialist of our group who 
is disposed to make the most of it. It is difficult, in 
fact, to imagine how he could make any more of 
it than he does. "The process culminated," he 
tells us, " at the beginning of the present decade, 
when * big business ' was in practically undisputed 
possession of both the major parties, of Congress 
and the presidency, and of the governments in every 
town, city, and State in America." 

I think that we should not take Mr. Sinclair as 
a fair representative of the socialist thought of our 
time. Certainly, he does not appear to good ad- 
vantage in comparison with the writers with whom 
I am here associating him. When we turn from 
almost any one of them to him, his rhetoric seems 

91 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

cheap, and much of his reasoning irritatingly ad 
captandum. Irritating also is his loose, irresponsi- 
ble handling of matters of fact, his positive asser- 
tion of things quite incapable of proof, — as when 
he states that Roosevelt got a second term in 1 904 
only by the death of Senator Hanna, — and such 
outbursts of undisciplined feeling as his heaping of 
rather vulgar epithets upon the German Emperor. 
But his book may perhaps serve at least to indi- 
cate the socialistic view of the most recent phases 
of our political and economic life. 

His main contention is that practically all the 
ills which we now endure as a community — not 
the political ills only but the economic and the 
social as well — are the outcome, and the per- 
fectly logical outcome, of the regime of competi- 
tion, under which a few private individuals have 
at last gained possession of all the means of pro- 
duction. The subversion of government is but one 
phase of the racking and squeezing which society 
must continue to endure so long as capital, omnip- 
otent, shall continue to demand profits. 

This, of course, is not new. Nor is there any- 
thing new in his remedy — the extinction of pri- 

92 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

vate ownership of capital and the taking-over by 
the community of all the machinery and other 
appliances of industry. Nor yet does it seem a new 
thing to be told that we are come to a crisis, and 
that the " revolution " is at hand. It provokes a 
kind of smile, indeed, to remember how many 
times society has been told that it was passing 
through a "transitional stage," how constantly 
" the present crisis " has been discovered. And not 
by socialists only ; it would almost seem that men 
cannot write earnestly, with feeling, about soci- 
ety, without discovering a crisis. But Mr. Sinclair 
contrives to give some novelty to his contention. 
One of his chief devices is a curious parallel be- 
tween the present " present crisis " and that other 
crisis of the fifties out of which came the revolu- 
tion that overthrew slavery ; and his journalistic in- 
stinct is keen enough to furnish forth the parallel 
with incidents which make it readable. The rev- 
olution is to come within a year after the presi- 
dential election of 191 2. (The author admitted 
that it might come this past summer, — the book 
was written in the spring, — but he is entitled to 
the credit of having clearly preferred the later 

93 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

date.) To Secretary Taft, as President from 1908 
to 1 9 1 2, President Buchanan's role of " the last 
figurehead " is assigned, while the parts of other 
leading actors in the earlier crisis — Webster, 
Clay, Sumner, John Brown, and the rest — go to 
various living celebrities ranging in quality from 
former President Cleveland to Mr. Jack London. 
Lincoln, we may be sure, is not neglected. He 
will find his counterpart as an emancipator in Mr. 
W. R. Hearst, of the New York "Journal " and 
various other newspapers.^ Even the method and 
process of the revolution are quite frankly revealed ; 
Mr. Sinclair is not a secret conspirator, but, as he 
announces in his preface, " a scientist and a pro- 
phet." 

If one were compelled, with no prompting of 
personal grievance, to choose between this and 
even the most conservative, the most placid view 

' Whose modesty, let us trust, has not led him to forbid the editors 
of those papers to make mention of this tribute to their owner. It is to 
be hoped also that, while not failing to mention with approval the volume 
which contains this illuminating comparison, Mr. Hearst's papers have 
pointed out that it is Mr. Sinclair's novel. The Jungle, — not The In- 
dustrial Republic, — which, as Mr. Sinclair himself informs us, has been 
compared to Uncle Torn' s Cabin. These are points on which, after the 
revolution, school children ought not to be misled. 

94 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

of the Republic to be found in any of these writers, 
it is hard to see how one could hesitate. Such 
hurried reasoning, so suffused with feeling, can 
only prevail, one would think, with minds already 
filled with such a wish for change as will readily 
father the thought of revolution. But there are 
quieter socialists than Mr. Sinclair, who make 
their way by more careful steps to revolutionary 
views of society ; and there are men with no bent 
whatever toward socialism who feel much as he 
does about the competitive system in its present 
phase and its effects in our American life. 

All the writers of our group, indeed, go so far 
as to admit that we must deal henceforth with 
conditions and with forces which our founders 
did not and could not contemplate ; that our sys- 
tem must therefore, if it is to endure, withstand a 
new kind of strain, perhaps discharge new func- 
tions. " Our political system has proved successful 
under simple conditions," says Secretary Root. 
" It still remains to be seen how it will stand the 
strain of the vast complication of life upon which 
we are now entering." 

Does the admission mean that we must intro- 

95 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

duce into it any new principle or principles ? that 
Lowell was wrong, and really begged the ques- 
tion, when he said that the Republic will survive 
so long as it shall adhere to the principles of the 
founders ? That is the drift of much writing and 
speaking nowadays. It is one form, apparently, of 
the reaction which takes place in many minds 
when they find they must give over the comfort- 
able assumption that all the great constitutional 
questions are settled, that no problem of free gov- 
ernment can prove really troublesome to people 
who have already attained civil and religious lib- 
erty, the ballot, the public school. 

It is not, however, the view of Secretary Root, 
who of all the conservatives of our group makes 
the most systematic attempt at a forecast of the 
future. On the contrary, he is clear that we shall 
need no new principles whatever, but only " the 
adaptation of the same old principles of law with 
which our fathers were familiar." True, the Sec- 
retary confesses that he regards optimism as the 
plain duty of every citizen and pessimism as " crim- 
inal weakness " ; but his quiet recital of what he 
considers favorable signs for the future of free 

96 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

government in America is quite without the ob- 
jectionable quality one finds in Mr. Sinclair's 
prophesying. 

Secretary Root looks to tendency, rather than 
achievement ; and he is hopeful, not because he 
finds our public life as it should be, but because he 
does find it — undeniably lamentable as are some 
of its aspects — measurably better than it has been. 
He enumerates our gains. We have vastly im- 
proved our civil service; the several extensions 
of the merit system have deprived the spoilsmen, 
the office-brokers, of the greater part of their 
stock-in-trade. We have won for both life and 
property far greater security than they had at 
the time of our beginnings. We manage our be- 
nevolent institutions better and better. We have 
raised the standard for nearly all elective officials ; 
an Aaron Burr, for instance, could hardly be 
chosen nowadays to the vice-presidency. We have 
been so far successful in the long fight against 
corruption that the scandals of President Grant's 
time — the Credit Mobilier fraud, the peculations 
of Belknap, Secretary of War, the Whiskey Ring, 
the Tweed Ring — have to-day no counterparts. 

97 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

We have gradually developed a public opinion 
vv^hich would utterly condemn practices that were 
quite common a century ago, such as the use of 
lotteries to secure money for seminaries of learn- 
ing. We have begun to mulct railroads for grant- 
ing rebates to favored shippers, and to prosecute 
great capitalists for manipulating railroad and 
other corporations to their own interests, — of- 
fenses which long went unpunished. We have 
similarly begun to take account of the thefts of 
our public lands. We have done much, by the 
Australian ballot and other measures of reform, 
to prevent corrupt practices at elections. 

These gains are real and substantial ; this there 
is no denying. But are they enough ? Are they 
enough to offset the positive reasons for discon- 
tent enumerated by Mr. Sinclair and by abler 
writers ? Are they enough, if we adhere to Secre- 
tary Root's own point of view, and consider only 
tendency, direction, to offset such a list as might 
be made of the respects in which we have lost 
rather than gained ? 

For we must observe that Mr. Root says noth- 
ing of that. He does not strike a balance, or show 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

us the other side of the picture. Yet he would 
hardly deny that something discouraging may be 
said on this very point of tendency, of direction, 
which he emphasizes. Socialists may be wrong 
when they tell us the poor have been growing 
poorer, but they are not wrong when they tell us 
that the rich are growing richer. Neither are 
those writers wrong, on the other hand, who point 
out that the new organization of industry into pro- 
digious trusts, real as may be its economies, tends 
to stifle the enterprise of individuals and to deprive 
us altogether of a certain noble and loving quality 
in work, as precious to the workman as it is in- 
valuable and inimitable in his product. Nor are 
they entirely wrong who find in the labor unions 
a well-nigh equal tendency to destroy the pre- 
mium which an elder regime put upon the in- 
dustry and the competence of the individual la- 
borer. Nor yet are they wrong who hold that 
these tendencies away from excellence in in- 
dustry work their way also into the life of the 
State. 

It is a question of gains and losses, therefore ; 
not of gains alone. We cannot reckon upon any 

99 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

saving inertia in the Republic which will always 
incline it toward justice and righteousness, save as 
the wicked and selfish among us may divert it to 
their evil ends. On the contrary, the labor of re- 
form keeps still its Sisyphean character ; the stone 
that patriots toil so hard to roll upward will al- 
ways, once they remove their shoulders, slip back 
downhill again. 

Perhaps we have not yet, we Americans, fully 
considered how long humanity has been at this 
endless task ; how many shoulders have been at the 
stone ; how many times it has gone painfully up- 
ward ; how many times, how suddenly, over what 
anguish and despair and shame, it has rolled down- 
ward. Were we always to keep in mind the entire 
past of representative government and of democ- 
racy, we should often, I doubt not, tremble at 
the thought of the vastness of our audacity. We 
should wish, perhaps, that we had willed to try 
our experiment on a smaller scale; that we had 
waved back the millions of Europe's baffled and 
beaten who have thronged across the Atlantic to 
our shores ; that the other millions left behind 
would not still look to us so wistfully, as though 

100 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

we were condemned to bear the burden of the 
whole world's hope in democracy. 

This might well be one's mood as one consid- 
ered it all, — but not if one considered it at sea. 

How inevitably, if one thinks long of the State, 
the old figure of the ship recurs ! And how surely, 
if in thought or in fact one looks out upon the 
ocean, and forward to the prow, rising and falling, 
and backward to the vessel's foaming wake, and 
upward to the bridge, one's mood grows firmer, 
more heroical ! How surely, also, when one is at 
sea, do human affairs, with all their bewildering 
intricacy, sink away into that right perspective 
which permits the mind to dwell resolvedly upon 
the elementary, the elemental things ! There, no 
willful optimism can blot out the dreary vision 
of human selfishness, as tireless and hungry as the 
waves ; of human folly, as restless and as incon- 
sequent ; of human misery, as widespread and as 
ceaseless. But neither can any coward awe ob- 
scure the shining truth that over all the ocean's 
moods — its mists and storms, no less than its 
tranquillities — the ship is victor. And the mind, 
guided by that thought, rests upon the primal, 

lOI 



PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA 

saving facts of human courage, wisdom, hope un- 
conquerable, — even as he v^ho v^^alks tlie bridge 
and finds the ship her course is fearless, knov^ing 
that he has always the compass and the sextant, 
the sun, the stars. 
1908. 



THE WHITE PERIL 

THE IMMEDIATE DANGER OF THE NEGRO 



THE WHITE PERIL: 

THE IMMEDIATE DANGER 

OF THE NEGRO 

ON a recent tour of the Southern States, from 
Virginia to Texas, I took with me two pic- 
tures of Southern civilization at earlier periods. 
One was Frederick Law Olmsted's record of his 
travels in the South near the close of the slavery- 
regime — a series of volumes which John Morley 
and the late E. L. Godkin have both thought 
worthy of comparison with Arthur Young's 
"Travels in France." The other was my own 
abundant memories of Southern life in the period 
immediately after Reconstruction. 

Comparing my present-day observations with 
these two presentments of the past, I was con- 
vinced that a very important and a very deep change 
in the basis of the entire industrial system of the 
South is quietly in progress. For confirmation, 
I have turned to the elaborate and painstaking 

105 



THE WHITE PERIL 

Report on the Negroes which has recently issued 
from the Bureau of the Census at Washington. 
Confirmations of a sort I do seem to find there ; 
but it is extremely doubtful if from that source 
alone I should ever have derived my conviction. 
In presenting it, therefore, I shall rely rather on 
the concrete observations of my journey than on 
the figures which may seem to sustain them. 
These would not have their full value nor their 
true significance unless one applied them cease- 
lessly to a mental picture of the South as it is, 
and to Southerners as they are, and to negroes 
and mulattoes as they are — not to dehumanized 
"whites" and "blacks." 

It is a century, perhaps, since Virginia ceased 
to be the main source of the controlling tenden- 
cies of Southern life. Her soil is no longer the 
best ground for the study of the civilization which 
had its rise there. Geography, however, abets the 
suggestion of history that any examination of the 
South should begin there : and, if one is looking 
particularly for signs of economic and industrial 
change, Virginia is by no means to be neglected. 
It is doubtful if in any but the very youngest of 

io6 



THE WHITE PERIL 

the States deeper social changes could be observed 
than in this, the oldest. 

Two movements of population are, perhaps, 
the most important: an exodus and an immigra- 
tion. There is a steady and widespread movement 
of negroes from the countrysides into the towns, 
and out of the State into the North ; and there is 
a moderate but fairly steady, and apparently in- 
creasing, inflow of whites. The gain of whites 
from without is not, it is true, so rapid as in many 
other parts of the country. The rate is probably 
below the average for the Atlantic tier of States. 
Neither is it equal to Virginia's present capacity 
and demand for white population: for there is 
much waste land within her borders that would 
yield a fair return to careful husbandry, there are 
many still untrodden avenues to wealth. But it is 
certainly interesting to learn that farmers from the 
far Northwest are coming nowadays in consid- 
erable numbers, sometimes in little colonies, to 
make their homes on the banks of the James and 
the Potomac and the Roanoke. What is still more 
significant is that some portion of our immense 
immigration from Europe is at last being diverted, 

107 



THE WHITE PERIL 

be it only in driblets and wavelets, from the great 
Eastern cities and the growing States of the West 
and Northwest to the oldest of all the Southern 
States, 

And it is not unreasonable to hope that immi- 
gration of both these kinds, which for a century 
and more the South has in vain desired, may con- 
tinue to increase. The movement of the blacks 
townward and northward is so widespread and per- 
sistent that it is only natural to wonder who will 
take their places on the farms. All over the State, 
complaints are heard of the scarcity of agricul- 
tural labor. Equally common is the complaint 
that the negro as a laborer, particularly as a farm- 
hand, is deteriorating. It is harder and harder, 
one hears on all sides, to bind him to the soil or to 
long terms of service in any line ; and he is likely 
to leave at the very seasons when the farmer needs 
him the most. The situation — taken with the 
fact of an increase of immigration — suggests the 
curious possibility of a sort of second colonization 
of the oldest of all our shores. 

Even in the cities, though the proportion of 
negroes in the urban population has not declined, 

io8 



THE WHITE PERIL 

it is plain that more and more white men are turn- 
ing to kinds of work which used to be done by 
negroes only. In domestic service, it is true, this 
is not the case; and in justice it must be said that 
of all negro domestic servants the best are doubt- 
less to be found in eastern Virginia. The negroes 
of that region have profited by the longest train- 
ing — and in the best school of manners — that 
any portion of the race has ever anywhere received. 
But it is plain that the whites are gaining in the 
shops and mills and factories, and in many other 
employments, in the Virginian towns. In the cit- 
ies, workingmen's suburbs, where the children one 
sees about the doors are white, are growing quite 
as fast as the quarters given over to negroes. This, 
it may as well be said at once, is true also of the 
cities in other parts of the South. 

In the cities and towns of the Carolinas, where 
such a rapid progress has been made in the manu- 
facture of cotton and of tobacco, these tendencies 
are even more strikingly exhibited. The new in- 
dustrial movement in those States has been strong- 
est in the interior counties, particularly in what 
is called the Piedmont section. The Piedmont 

109 



THE WHITE PERIL 

country has always been the habitat of the small 
white farmer; and it is people of this class in 
whom and by whom the important changes have 
been wrought. It is chiefly they who have manned 
the new mills and factories, populated the new 
manufacturing towns, and increased so rapidly the 
population of the transformed older towns. To 
any one familiar with the old Southern class dis- 
tinctions, this will be apparent from the briefest 
visit to such a place as Charlotte, in North Caro- 
lina, or Spartanburg, in South Carolina. The new- 
comers, it is easy to see, are " up-country folks" ; 
and according to the nomenclature of his own 
particular quarter of the South the visitor will set 
them down as " Crackers," as " Moss-Backs," as 
"Red-Necks," as "Hillians," as " Coveites," as 
" Wool-Hats," or as " Copperas-Breeches." 

True, there are negro quarters in all the larger 
towns of the Piedmont region, though not in the 
cotton-mill villages. It is true also that there are 
negroes employed in the tobacco factories. In 
these establishments, in fact, one finds them at 
work side by side with the whites, frequently on 
the same piece and at the same machine. That 

no 



THE WHITE PERIL 

is a phenomenon which might have been observed 
in Richmond also. It is nowhere in the South 
quite so common a sight as to suggest the lying 
down together of the lion and the lamb. If, how- 
ever, we consider it with a right historical perspec- 
tive, the real sign of change is in the white man's 
being there, not in the presence of the negro. 

In the cotton-mills, the negro is not found at all. 
A few years ago, one could have found him in a mill 
at Charleston, owned and managed by white men. 
Until a few months ago, he could also have been 
found in a little mill at Concord, in North Carolina, 
owned and managed by members of his race. But 
with the failure of these two experiments he seems 
to have disappeared entirely from the cotton indus- 
try of the South Atlantic and South Central States. 
The only cotton-mill in the entire South which 
now employs negroes is, I believe, at Dallas,Texas.^ 
Meanwhile, to meet the demand for mill-hands in 
the Carolinas alone, from fifty to a hundred thou- 
sand white people have given up other employ- 
ments, — mainly, no doubt, farming. 

» A silk-mill at Fayetteville, North Carolina, operated by negroes, 
is said to be successful. 

Ill 



THE WHITE PERIL 

The failure of the negro to find a place in this 
industry, now firmly established in the South, and 
growing with an amazing growth, is too big a fact 
to be taken without some scrutiny of the tests by 
which his unfitness for it seems to have been estab- 
lished. At least two very high authorities are de- 
cidedly of opinion that the trials which have been 
made of negro labor in the cotton-mills are by no 
means conclusive. The president of half a dozen 
large and successful mills points out^ that the ex- 
periment at Charleston was made under conditions 
which would probably have been fatal even if 
white labor had been employed. The industry 
never has taken root in the coast towns, nor, indeed, 
in any old urban community like Charleston. It is 
understood that the machinery of the Charleston 
mill was old; and a principal advantage of the 
Southern mills in general is that their machinery 
is of the newest and the best. The labor employed 
was not carefully selected, or in any way segre- 
gated. The chances are that the capital behind the 
enterprise was inadequate. That was also the case 
in the experiment at Concord. In this view, Prin- 

* In conversation with the writer. 
112 



THE WHITE PERIL 

cipal Washington, of Tuskegee, concurs.' He 
believes that negro labor could be successfully used 
under the conditions which have been found es- 
sential with white labor : that is to say, in a segre- 
gated mill settlement, owned and controlled by the 
owners of the plant, and with adequate capital, 
competent management, and new machinery. 

In this reasoning there is much force. But a lost 
battle is not restored by proving that it ought to 
have been won. It may not help the matter to ex- 
plain that the field was unfavorable, the tactics bad, 
the odds unfair. Insufficient and inconclusive as 
the tests have been, the event may prove that the 
negro's chance in the cotton-mills is, none the 
less, lost forever. The mill president whose view 
has been given is not desirous of seeing the ques- 
tion reopened. The industry is in a good way as it 
is. The South is rapidly gaining on all the other 
centers of it. Every year, the white labor employed 
in the mills grows more and more skillful. It is also 
being trained systematically for the manufacture 
of finer and finer grades of cottons. Moreover, 
usage is fast hardening into custom, and custom 

^ In a letter to the writer. 



THE WHITE PERIL 

soon makes rights. It is now quite probable that 
the Carolina mill-hands would instantly rebel at 
any such association with negroes as the operatives 
in tobacco factories accept as a matter of course. 
The superintendent of the largest mill in the 
Carolinas is positive that if a single negro opera- 
tive were brought into it every man, woman, and 
child in the establishment would walk out. Even 
if no attempt were made to introduce negroes in 
the same mills with whites it is by no means certain 
that the whites would endure their competition. 

The reader, no doubt, begins already to under- 
stand the nature of the change in the South's in- 
dustrial system which my journey was by this time 
leading me to think that I perceived. What the 
Carolinas seem to exhibit better, perhaps, than any 
other part of the South is the rapid emergence of 
the nativepoor whites, the South's great unutilized 
industrial reserves, from the narrow limitations 
which slavery set them, and which nearly three 
hundred years of ignorance, inertia, and prejudice 
had strengthened into a Chinese wall of hopeless 
conservatism. They have come at once into com- 
petition with the negroes, — either direct, and on 

. 114 



THE WHITE PERIL 

fairly equal terms, as in the tobacco factories, or in- 
direct, and far more fatal to the negroes, as in the 
cotton-mills. What at present appears is that they 
no sooner entered into this great industry than the 
negroes were excluded from it altogether. The vic- 
tory is signal. The effect of the exclusion on the 
negro's future can scarcely be overestimated. But 
this is only one of the many advantages vs^hich in 
the townward movement, strong in both races, 
the poor white is winning in the search for town 
employments. It is certainly not unreasonable to 
associate these facts with the other movement 
among the negroes — the movement northward. 
Of that, however, less is heard as one travels 
farther southward and southwestward. Florida is 
evidently gaining negroes fast by migration, and 
the movement southwestward, to the prairies and 
river-bottoms of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Ar- 
kansas, continues fairly steady. Nevertheless, in 
the cities and towns of the Lower South also, even 
in those of the Black Belt, it is apparent that the 
white people are changing their attitude toward 
the manual occupations. For one sign of the 
change, white barbers are now common, even in 

115 



THE WHITE PERIL 

the smaller country towns. Twenty years ago, they 
were extremely rare outside of the real cities. A 
still more striking innovation is the occasional 
employment of white women, presumably from 
the up-country, as chambermaids in hotels — even, 
in one instance, in a hotel where the other serv- 
ants are colored. It was left, however, for New 
Orleans, the largest of all distinctively Southern 
cities, to exhibit the general change more vari- 
ously and convincingly than any other. 

The population of New Orleans is peculiarly 
good material for the study of race relationships. 
The mixture, not of races merely, but of customs 
and standards, of traditions and ideals, is extraor- 
dinary. Yet it does not require a long observation 
of the present situation there to make one feel 
sure that the African has lost ground relatively to 
all the rest. It is possible now to live in New Or- 
leans as free from any dependence on the services 
of negroes as one could be in New York or Bos- 
ton. The supply of white domestic servants is, no 
doubt, still scant. But white cooks and waiters are 
not very hard to find ; and white barbers and hair- 
dressers, white carpenters and joiners and masons 

ii6 



THE WHITE PERIL 

and blacksmiths and shoemakers, and the like, are 
at hand in sufficient numbers. Bricklaying is by a 
competent authority' declared to be the only trade 
which the negroes still control. The contrast in 
these occupations with the very recent past is fairly 
startling. In 1870, the city directory showed a 
total of 3460 negroes at work as carpenters, cigar- 
makers, painters, clerks, shoemakers, coopers, tai- 
lors, bakers, and blacksmiths and foundry hands. 
There are not to-day ten per cent of that num- 
ber of negroes employed in the same trades, several 
of which have been completely lost to the whites. 
Yet, meanwhile, the negro population of New 
Orleans has increased by more than fifty per cent, 
— a greater gain than the white population shows. 
The mass of the negroes are now enrolled in the 
occupations which require the least intelligence 
and skill, the class called merely "laborers " ab- 
sorbing thousands. 

It is actually held that in property and in social 
station, as well as in industry, the negroes of New 
Orleans are worse off to-day, relatively and abso- 

* Mr. Norman Walker, of the Times-Democrat, whose knowledge 
of New Orleans, past and present, is most thorough. 

117 



THE WHITE PERIL 

lutely, than they were in the year i860. The 
statement may be misleading, however, unless one 
takes account of the unique place which the city 
held in Southern civilization while slavery per- 
sisted. It was the Mecca of free negroes. The 
Latin element in the white population was pro- 
portionally stronger than at present ; and as a rule 
the Latins do not treat negroes as Anglo-Saxons 
do. Nowhere else in the South could a man with 
a single drop of African blood in his veins attain 
the degree of social acceptance which a consider- 
able class of mulattoes enjoyed at New Orleans. 
A peculiar local custom went far to account for 
this, and for the material well-being, the intelli- 
gence, and the refinement of manners, which the 
New Orleans mulattoes frequently displayed. From 
an early period in the history of the town, a sys- 
tem of concubinage prevailed there, which was 
quite unlike the ordinary illegitimate intercourse 
between the races. Arrangements with something 
of the character of morganatic marriages were 
common. The children of such unions were usu- 
ally well taken care of, and often highly edu- 
cated, not infrequently at Paris. Abroad, they 

118 



THE WHITE PERIL 

easily passed for white. At home, they had a social 
life of their own which was not without grace 
and elegance. But they enjoyed none of the rights 
of citizenship, and were always enumerated as 
negroes. 

There is no more curious effect of emancipa- 
tion than the fate which has befallen the surviv- 
ors and the descendants of this unfortunate class. 
Their habits and training under slavery had un- 
fitted them for the opportunities which freedom 
brought ; and freedom denied them the peculiar 
place which slavery had kept open. Some of them 
made their way to France, where it is probable 
that their origin is not known. But the greater 
number were simply driven into the negro quar- 
ters of the town ; and there they have gradually lost 
their separateness and ceased to be a class. The 
faces of their children are darker than theirs; 
their grandchildren's, darker still. The airs and 
graces of the half-world are gone, along with the 
occupation they were won and worn in. Its shame 
and its curious distinctions and privileges have 
been lost together. It must be added that what is 
true in this peculiar way of New Orleans is true 

119 



THE WHITE PERIL 

in another way of the other cities of the South. 
In the lowest of all human competitions, the wo- 
man of Africa succumbs to a rivalry more artful 
and more shameful than her own. 

To these general tendencies of town life the 
towns and cities of the Southwest offer no excep- 
tions. As one passes beyond the coast belt of Texas, 
the proportion of negroes rapidly lessens, but their 
preference for the town over the country is even 
more marked than it is to the eastward. The 
planters declare that it is impossible to hold them 
on the plantations. Yet in the towns it is said that 
the majority of them subsist on the earnings of a 
small minority who are at work, the women do- 
ing more than their part, chiefly as servants and 
laundresses. For the coming of white men into 
manual employments is even more marked in 
Texas than in the older Southern States. As a 
rule, they control the city trades completely. In 
Houston, for instance, it is said that the unions 
would not stop at force and violence if the ne- 
groes offered them any troublesome competition. 

That, however, is not the situation in most 
Southern cities. As a rule, the relation of the 

120 



THE WHITE PERIL 

trades unions to the race question is quite differ- 
ent; and the writer must confess that the forces 
engaged in this particular quarter of the field have 
aligned themselves in a way which to him was 
altogether surprising. His expectation was that, 
sooner or later, the negro being excluded from 
the unions, the race prejudice would reinforce the 
union man's hatred of the scab, and the labor ques- 
tion would thus take on in the South a character 
more savage and dangerous than it has ever had in 
the North. But in this forecast something in the 
human nature of one or the other race, or of both, 
was overlooked. The negroes have never ventured 
into any serious rivalry with the white unions. 
They do, it is true, form unions among themselves,, 
which are, as it is said, "affiliated " with those of 
the whites. But what this means in practice is that 
both unions are controlled by white men. Even 
when the whites in a particular trade or a particu- 
lar establishment are only a minority, they have 
their way. Negroes rarely or never offer to take 
the place of white men who strike or are locked 
out. The explanation doubtless is that, with good 
reason, they fear white men of the working class 

121 



THE WHITE PERIL 

worse than they fear employers and capitalists, who 
frequently belong to the class so often described as 
the natural protectors of the blacks. It seems to 
be a fact that white workingmen from the North 
are more bitterly opposed to sharing any occu- 
pation with negroes than the native whites are. 
However, the situation in the Southwest may 
indicate that when the whites have sufficient num- 
bers to monopolize the city trades they will in- 
cline to exclude negroes altogether. 

All these things might be true of the towns, and 
the negro might still be reasonably safe if in the 
country his place were secure. Southern civiliza- 
tion is still markedly rural. The country still 
greatly outweighs the town in wealth and in 
population. 

But there is much in the country to strengthen 
the general inference one naturally makes from 
what appears in the towns. In the country, also, 
white men are doing more and more of the work 
that was formerly left to negroes. 

This is particularly true of those parts of Vir- 
ginia and the Carolinas whence the negroes are 
migrating northward so steadily. There are even 

122 



THE WHITE PERIL 

instances, in those quarters, of large planters and 
landowners who now make it a rule to have nei- 
ther negro laborers nor negro tenants, aiming 
especially to guard against sudden departures. 
Wherever the new regime has been thus candidly 
accepted, it seems unlikely that the old will ever 
be restored. Once free of their long dependence 
on the African, these people will hardly go back 
to it of their own accord. 

But it is still more important, in any forecast 
of the future, that one finds a tendency to displace 
the negro farmhand and the negro tenant in re- 
gions where it cannot be attributed to a voluntary 
withdrawal of the negroes. If it were not so, one 
might incline to explain the general invasion of 
manual employments by white people on the 
ground of mere necessity, since there is more work 
to do nowadays than ever before in the South, and 
relatively fewer negroes to do it. The tendency 
does appear, however, in quarters where the ne- 
groes are increasing, increasing by migration, 
increasing faster than the whites. It is observable 
in such strongholds of the African laborer as the 
Black Belt of Georgia and Alabama, the Yazoo- 

123 



THE WHITE PERIL 

Mississippi Delta, the valley of the Brazos in 
Texas. 

It is not, in these quarters, the native poor w^hite 
with whom the negro has to reckon. The up- 
country people, though they are coming into the 
towns, show little disposition to invade the prairies 
and the river-bottoms. It is the European, some- 
times the German, but oftener the peasant of 
southern Europe, particularly the Italian and the 
Bohemian, whose competition the negro of the 
cotton and rice and sugar belts, if he were wise, 
would now be learning to fear. In Texas, he en- 
counters the Mexican also ; and, here and there, 
one hears talk of trying Chinese coolies. But the 
real threat is from the South of Europe. 

Unfortunately, we do not know the propor- 
tions of this immigration into the South ; but after 
a survey of the field I am sure that it is already 
considerable, and the signs are that it is also fast 
increasing. That is the opinion of railroad and 
steamship officials and of immigration agents. 
Even in the towns, effects of it are easily discern- 
ible. At least one great railroad system has begun 
to use Italians instead of negroes for track work, 

124 



THE WHITE PERIL 

as is done so commonly in the North. The new- 
comers are also finding their way into mills and 
factories. But nothing will impress so deeply any 
one familiar with the life of the Lower South as 
their appearance in the sugar-fields, the rice-fields, 
and the cotton-fields. 

To understand how the inroad has been made 
and what it may conceivably herald, it is neces- 
sary to understand what the present-day planta- 
tion of the Lower South is like. A series of 
changes has transformed it into a very different 
affair from what it was under slavery, and for 
some years after the war. In place of the old-time 
planter, there is now a landlord. In place of the 
slave or the hired laborer, there is a tenant : some- 
times a "cash tenant," paying a fixed money 
rental, but oftener a "share tenant," paying his 
rent with a part of the crop. Instead of a single 
and single-headed patriarchal community, there 
are a number of little farms under one ownership. 
It is true that the landlord retains, occasionally 
by contract, universally by custom, many of the 
rights of supervision and control which he had 
as a planter. He or his overseer is constantly in- 

125 



THE WHITE PERIL 

specting, advising — in effect, commanding. He 
usually keeps in his own hands the fencing and 
draining and general up-keep of his land. It is 
more than likely that he advances the tenants 
their supplies. He may even own the tenant's 
tools and stock, as well as his cabin. Sometimes 
his control is so nearly complete that it might be 
more correct to describe the division of the crop 
as a payment by him to the tenant for his services 
than as a payment by the tenant to him for the 
land. Of course, there is also the small independ- 
ent farmer, white or black. But the share-tenant 
plantation is the typical agricultural community 
of the Cotton Belt. 

One of the earliest attempts to introduce the 
peasant of southern Europe into this system was 
made twelve years ago, by the late Mr. Austin 
Corbin, at Sunnyside Plantation, on the Arkansas 
side of the Mississippi River. A colony of Ital- 
ians was brought over, and established in tenantry 
under contracts which looked to the final pur- 
chase of their holdings. Mr. Corbin died, how- 
ever, before the enterprise was well under way. 
The men in charge of it were not, it is understood, 

126 



THE WHITE PERIL 

familiar with local conditions or experienced in 
plantation management. As first planned and con- 
ducted, it failed. But with the failure came a 
change. Men to the manner born were put in 
charge. It can be stated to-day, on the best au- 
thority, that the experiment of tenant-farming 
with Italians at Sunnyside is successful from the 
point of view of the managers and owners, bril- 
liantly successful from the point of view of the 
immigrants themselves. They have mastered 
quickly what they had to learn about the growing 
of cotton and the other crops. They have endured 
the climate. They have proved both more indus- 
trious and more thrifty than the negroes about 
them. Though they began with nothing, a num- 
ber now own the land they cultivate. Several have 
bank-accounts running into the thousands. Some 
are sending money home to pay debts or to bring 
over their kin. 

It is probable that the Sunnyside colony was 
selected with some care, and from the thrifty peas- 
ant farmers of the interior of Italy. Quite likely, 
therefore, these people are superior to the mass 
of Italian emigrants to this country, drawn mainly 

127 



THE WHITE PERIL 

from Sicily and the lower end of the Peninsula. 
But what has happened at Sunnyside is happening 
at too many other places to be regarded any longer 
as extraordinary. One instance is carefully de- 
scribed in a Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor.' 
At Calumet, a sugar-plantation in Louisiana, none 
but negro labor was employed up to eight years 
ago. Since then there has been a gradual dis- 
placement of the negroes by Italians. It does not 
appear that either there or at Sunnyside the blacks 
are stimulated by the example and competition of 
the newcomers to work harder or to save money. 
It is found, too, that more Italian than negro chil- 
dren work in the fields, and at harder labor. I 
have heard of Italian tenants who, after harvesting 
their own crops, have hired themselves as cotton- 
pickers to negro tenants who were behindhand. It 
has come to be a common saying, where the ways 
of both races are known, that if an Italian earns 
a dollar and a quarter he will spend the quarter and 
save the dollar, but that if a negro earns the same 
amount he will spend — a dollar and a half 

T ^ No. 38. ne 'Negroes of Cinclare and Calumet. By J. B/Laws. 
* Italian emigration to the South seems at present to be entering on a 

128 



THE WHITE PERIL 

The Italian as laborer and tenant on the plan- 
tation of the Lower South is no longer an experi- 
ment. It is clear that as a rule he does the work 
at least as well as the negro, and that he is more 
likely to save money and become a landowner. 
The testimony concerning Bohemians is quite as 
favorable. The success of the large German colo- 
nies in Texas, Alabama, and other parts of the 
South has long been established. Yet it is true that 
many planters, probably a majority, still prefer the 
negro, and particularly the uneducated negro, both 
as laborer and as tenant. 

Explanations, however, are not far to seek. 
There is custom, tradition, prejudice. There is, in 
most cases, a genuine fondness for negroes. There 
is the habit of command,to which the negro makes 
the least resistance. Moreover, by the system of 
advances, the planter can be reasonably sure of ob- 

new phase. Acting for the Italian Government, II Cavaliere A. Rossi and 
G. Rossati and Professor A. Ravaioli have been carefUlly studying the oppor- 
tunities which various sections hold out to their countrymen, particularly 
to agriculturists. Their reports are so favorable to parts of the Southern 
States that Baron Mayor des Planches, the Italian Ambassador, has heart- 
ily indorsed an organized movement to turn Italians in that direction. I 
wish there were space to use the information concerning this most inter- 
esting enterprise which Baron Mayor has kindly placed at my disposal. 

129 



THE WHITE PERIL 

taining from negro tenants what are called "spec- 
ulative profits," that is to say, interest on advances. 
The Italian tenant very soon saves enough to do 
without advances. Though the negro may be al- 
ways in debt, he rarely fails, in the long run, to 
pay ; and he is usually too poor a trader to get the 
best of a bargain — which the Italian frequently 
does. These considerations may for some time op- 
erate to keep the negro in the plantation system. 
But they will not suffice to keep the invaders out ; 
for all over the South the demand for tenants 
and farm laborers outruns the supply. 

This is, I know, but a scattering and incom- 
plete arrayal of the observations which have con- 
vinced me that the large province the negro has 
always held in the industry of the Southern States 
is now being formidably invaded. I think, how- 
ever, that enough has been given to show that 
his place in the South's industrial system can no 
longer be regarded as secure. Five years ago. Prin- 
cipal Washington declared that the next twenty 
years were going to be the most serious in the 
history of his race. " Within this period," he said, 
"it will be largely decided whether the negro 

130 



THE WHITE PERIL 

will be able to retain the hold which he now has 
upon the industries of the South, or whether his 
place will be filled by white people from a dis- 
tance." The wisdom of the forecast is already- 
proved; yet it neglected the native poor white. 

All that I have said has been by way of show- 
ing that the negro has lost ground. But without 
his losing some ground no invasion could have 
occurred ; and to say that it has occurred is not to 
say that he cannot resist it. Principal Washington 
is himself still undismayed. The apparent loss is, 
he holds, rather relative than absolute ; it is largely 
explained by the South's rapid development and 
the gains of the whites in mere numbers. He is 
also cheered by the entrance of negroes into 
higher and higher employments, such as clerk- 
ships, stenography, and various branches of" busi- 
ness." My belief is, however, that it is nearly al- 
ways mulattoes who rise in the industrial scale. It 
is probable, too, that the negroes have the same 
doubtful advantage that women have when they 
offer for the work of men. They will accept lower 
wages. 

It is in trying to determine how much ground 



THE WHITE PERIL 

the negro has lost that we turn most naturally to 
the statisticians. Unfortunately, the census-gath- 
erers leave unasked many questions we should like 
to see answered; and some of the changes I have 
been describing are so recent that the returns of 
five years ago may have been but little affected by 
them. All that has been said of the townward 
movement among both races, and of the north- 
ward movement of the negroes is, however, suffi- 
ciently confirmed. But it is the tables dealing with 
occupations which seem most apposite. I shall not 
attempt to analyze them. It is safer to rest on the 
careful inferences of the experts.^ It should be ex- 
plained that the term " negroes," as used in the 
returns, covers all races other than the white. For 
the South, however, the error involved in the 
failure to distinguish among colored peoples can- 
not be great. 

In 1900, more than two thirds of all the ne- 
groes engaged in remunerative occupations in the 
Southern States were in the three classes described 

^ The bulk of the Report is the work of Professor Walter F. Willcox, 
of Cornell University, doubtless the first authority in the country on sta- 
tistics concerning negroes. Professor Dubois, of Atlanta University, in 
his chapter on "The Negro Farmer," is not less rigidly scientific. 

132 



THE WHITE PERIL 

as "laborers," "agricultural laborers," and "farm- 
ers, planters, and overseers." Within the decade, 
the number of negro "laborers" had increased by- 
more than 60 per cent, the " agricultural labor- 
ers" by 22.3 per cent, the "farmers, planters, 
and overseers " by 3 1 .1 per cent. The increase in 
the first class does not look hopeful, but the boun- 
dary lines between the three classes are so vague 
and shifting that reasoning about them from the 
tables is discouraged. The same difficulty is found 
with certain other classes. There are also certain 
occupations, such as teaching and the Christian 
ministry, in which there is no appreciable com- 
petition between the races. In yet a third group, 
including such large classes as the hostlers, the 
masons, and the porters and helpers in stores, no 
figures by races for the Southern States alone were 
given in 1890. It appears, however, that in the 
case of at least fourteen leading occupations the 
figures for the two census years reveal the true 
course of an actual competition. 

In five of those occupations, while both races 
gained, the negroes gained more rapidly than the 
whites. This was true of the class known as " ser- 

133 



THE WHITE PERIL 

vants and waiters," of the miners and quarrymen, 
of the nurses and midwives, of the iron and steel 
workers, and of the operatives in sawmills and 
planing-mills. In the other nine occupations, the 
negroes lost ground relatively to the whites. That 
is to say, the proportion of negroes among the 
draymen, truckmen, and teamsters in the South, 
among the steam-railroad employees, among the 
operatives in tobacco and cigar factories, among 
the fishermen and oystermen, among the engi- 
neers and firemen of other than locomotive en- 
gines, among the barbers and hairdressers, among 
the launderers and laundresses, among the seam- 
stresses, and among the carpenters and joiners, was 
less in 1 900 than it was in 1 890. In the two classes 
last named, there was an absolute decrease in the 
number of negroes. The figures for the whole 
country show also that there were fewer negro 
blacksmiths in 1 900 than in 1890; and there is no 
reason to suppose that what was true of the whole 
country was not true of the Southern States. 

The census tables, therefore, strengthen rather 
than weaken the inference from actual observa- 
tion. So far as they throw any light at all on the 

134 



THE WHITE PERIL 

inquiry, they indicate that five years ago the 
negroes were losing rather than gaining ground 
in the industries of the South. It is disappointing 
that they do not yield more positive inferences 
concerning the great group of occupations cov- 
ered by the general term " agriculture." We have, 
however, in the annual assessment lists of several 
Southern States which take account of the race 
to which each taxpayer belongs, some fairly safe 
material for an estimate of the negro's place in 
the greatest of Southern industries. 

The Georgia assessments have been closely stud- 
ied, and they seem to show that in the matter of 
acquiring land the negroes of that State are not 
now progressing as fast as they were at an earlier 
period of their history as freemen. In 1874, the 
negroes of Georgia owned, all together, more than 
a third of a million acres. In seven years from that 
date, the amount was doubled. Ten years later, in 
1 891, the total passed a million acres. But at the 
end of the next decade there was practically no 
increase at all. The figures for the total wealth of 
the Georgia negroes, from year to year, parallel 
closely the figures for land alone. There is an in- 

13s 



THE WHITE PERIL 

crease, gradual, but not constant, up to the early- 
nineties ; but for the next decade a slight positive 
decrease. However, it appears that the w^ealth of 
the white people of Georgia also declined in the 
nineties. It cannot be said, therefore, that negroes 
have been falling behind in the accumulation of 
property in general. But it is not clear that their 
failure to go on acquiring land is accounted for 
by the general shrinkage in values revealed by the 
assessments. 

Moreover, they are in no position to be con- 
tent with merely holding their own. Their own 
in Georgia is less than three per cent of all the 
land included in farms, and but little more than 
three per cent of the total wealth - — and they are 
nearly half the population. True, they began only 
forty years ago, and with nothing. But the whites 
also were at that time woefully impoverished. Is 
it reasonable to suppose that the disparity would 
now be nearly so great as it is if the two races 
were of equal capacity for accumulation ? If the 
disparity does not rapidly grow less, can it be con- 
tended that the negro is proving his case as a free- 
man, as an American? 

136 



THE WHITE PERIL 

For that, after all, in our commercial, industrial 
democracy, is the supreme test by which the ne- 
gro's future on the American continent will be 
determined. The change which, if my observation 
is not egregiously at fault, is now coming over the 
industries of the South, is not merely an invasion 
of the negro's occupations. It is, rather, a change 
of standards of efficiency in work ; and the negro's 
hope of rising, his chance of even holding his own, 
depends on his ability to live up to the new stand- 
ard. With the increase of population, and a keener 
and keener struggle for wealth, the standard of in- 
dustry, of skill, and of thrift will approximate more 
and more closely that of the Northern States and of 
the West of Europe. The white man whom the 
negro has to fear is no longer the man who would 
force him to work. It is the man who would 
take his work away from him. The danger, the 
immediate menace, is from rivalry rather than 
oppression. 

But this is not to say that oppression, past and 
present, has nothing to do with the situation. The 
social and political status of the negro must cer- 
tainly be considered. If it were different, his show- 



THE WHITE PERIL 

ing in industry might also be different. Some, no 
doubt, will hold that the characteristics which 
handicap him most heavily in the struggle are 
those he got from slavery. That opinion, however, 
is not so common as it used to be. It is now freely 
conceded, even by leading negroes, that the train- 
ing of slavery may have been as good a prepara- 
tion for the race's present opportunities as any 
that this unregulated world of men could ever 
conceivably have vouchsafed it. The negroes of 
America were in this way immeasurably advanced 
beyond the competence of their fellows in Africa. 
Nine Southern employers out of ten will still de- 
clare that they prefer the laborer who has been 
a slave to the younger representatives of freedom. 
No doubt, an exception must be made of the grad- 
uates of schools like Hampton and Tuskegee. 
The testimony of those who know at first hand 
the work and the lives of these young men and 
young women is almost uniformly favorable. They 
are, however, but a little leaven in so great a 
mass. They cannot be treated as representatives, 
for, apart from their exceptional training, they 
may be said to have been, in a sense, selected. 

138 



THE WHITE PERIL 

But whatever we may decide about the effects 
of slavery, it is clear, I think, that the denials 
which they endure under the caste system work, 
on the whole, unfavorably to the negroes in the 
struggle for wealth. The sum of the matter seems 
to be that life does not offer to them the same in- 
ducements to endeavor which it offers to the white 
men about them. In the struggle for the things of 
this world, the negro is not lured on, as the white 
man is, by the visions of the kingdoms of this 
world, and the glory of them. It is a common and 
no doubt a correct observation that he is weak in 
the desire and purpose of self-betterment. But de- 
sire is generally in some degree proportioned to its 
objects, and purpose to its opportunities. Black 
men, I suppose, cannot help feeling that what 
they can win from life is always short of what they 
might win if they were white. I do not believe 
that the mass of them are agonized with the 
sense of denial quite as white men would be in 
their place. But may not the sting of it be keen- 
est in those very men and women who, because 
they aspire most, must be counted on to do the 
most to lift up themselves and their fellows ? The 

139 



THE WHITE PERIL 

caste arrangement which has succeeded slavery is 
of necessity, in some measure, deadening to ambi- 
tion. On the other hand, it does not give the white 
man, as slavery did, the power, and the individ- 
ually selfish motive, to make the negro work- 
It has, no doubt, its compensations. There is 
sense in saying that to exclude the negro from 
politics was a good way to get him to work. He, 
like other human beings, probably works at times 
for the mere reason that there is nothing else in 
particular to do. It is also quite probably true that 
in his present stage he works best, as he fights best, 
under the eyes of those he looks to as superiors. 
Perhaps, from his low place in the social system, 
he exaggerates the happiness he would have in a 
higher, somewhat as the ignorant exaggerate the 
advantages of being learned. Possibly, if he were 
made in all things the white man's equal, he would 
lapse from those Caucasian ideals which attract 
him from above. But all these advantages of his 
being underneath, real as they may be, are, I 
think, more than offset by the practical uses white 
men may make of their superior station and their 
control over all branches of government. In the 

140 



THE WHITE PERIL 

courts of law, for instance, it is said that the prop- 
erty rights of the negro are protected quite as well 
as the white man's ; but this is not true of his per- 
son, of his life. The negro assailant of a white 
man rarely escapes his punishment ; the white as- 
sailant of the negro far too frequently does. More- 
over, in all business dealings, selfishness is to be 
presumed. If white men, in their business deal- 
ings with negroes, never stoop to profit by their 
ascendancy through caste, then human nature has 
been sadly maligned. 

It must, I think, be admitted that the com- 
petition is unequal. But it does not help the negro 
to dwell on the handicap he carries, whether from 
the past fact of slavery or the present fact of caste. 
Even if it should prove true that the heaviest 
handicap of all is his distinctly racial character- 
istics, entirely apart from his history in America, 
he might be no better off for admitting it. A 
wiser Godspeed is to tell him that his best chance, 
if not, indeed, his sole chance, of lifting himself, 
socially and politically, is precisely the chance he 
has of winning in the competition which is now 
being forced upon him. If he would strive for the 

141 



THE WHITE PERIL 

best place he can have in our American life, the 
way to it lies through work and saving. 

The misery of all our debating about him is 
that we cannot honestly pretend to be glad that 
he is here, or to desire that his seed shall increase. 
Yet surely we can afford the honesty of telling 
him the truth. Let us tell him, at least, that it is 
idle to put his faith in party platforms or laws 
of Congress or amendments to the Constitution. 
Let us tell him that if he would have the white 
man's ballot or the white man's culture, if he 
would exact from white men, across the line of 
caste, fair dealing and considerate treatment, he 
must learn to match the white man's industry, 
his shrewdness, his forethought of the morrow. 
Were the admonition harsher, it would be more 
sincere. If he would keep the foothold he" has 
now among us, if he would survive and live, and 
look to see his children live after him, he must 
put money in his purse. 

1904. 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

THE South is perpetually interesting. So 
much, at least, its severest critics concede. 
It used to be interesting because it was unlike the 
rest of the country, and insisted on remaining so. 
It is interesting still ; academic and other students 
of institutions continue to discover and explore 
it, and seem to find readers for their reports. But 
the reason is different. Although still measur- 
ably peculiar, it now attracts the philosophically 
minded because it is changing. No other part 
of the country, in fact, presents to-day quite 
such a spectacle of transitions. Five or six years 
ago, traversing it from Virginia to Texas, I mar- 
veled that it had grown so unlike what it had been 
fifteen years earlier. Revisiting it now, I seem to 
find it departing even more widely from the state 
and ways in which I found it then. 

If, however, one looks a little more carefully 
into these changes, they cease to seem so surpris- 
ingly sudden. So much, in fact, is almost axiomatic 

145 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

concerning all civilizations. The apparent quies- 
cence which precedes a striking evenement in poli- 
tics or social usage is usually only a surface calm, 
a mere stiffness of the crust, beneath which change 
has in fact been ceaseless; and this is particu- 
larly true of those alterations in the life of a 
community which accomplish themselves, and 
become overt, by sweeping legislation, swiftly 
enacted. 

Within a year or two, the South has surprised 
the rest of the country with the culmination of 
two such processes. Several States have suddenly 
and violently asserted the right to regulate rail- 
roads. Three have as suddenly prohibited the 
traffic in intoxicating liquors. Perhaps Oklahoma, 
which has come into the Union with prohibition 
in her Constitution, is sufficiently Southern to be 
added to this list. The North Carolina Legis- 
lature, in special session, has submitted a prohibi- 
tion statute to popular vote, in the full expectation 
that it will carry. In other States, a fervid and 
confessedly potent agitation looks to the same 
result. 

Of course, neither of these two kinds of legis- 

146 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

lation is confined to the South. Northern and 
Western States also have tried them, and still try 
them. But that might once have almost seemed 
a reason why one should not expect to find them 
prevailing in the South at all. What now is most 
surprising, and food for philosophizing, is that 
the South is not only becoming like the rest of 
the country, but " more so." The facts suggest, 
and not altogether misleadingly, that some social 
force or forces, long potent elsewhere, but in the 
South atrophied or baffled, may now be at work 
there with the proverbial energy of things new 
or newly freed. It would not be a very bad gen- 
eralization to say that the South has recently 
come into that phase of democracy in which 
government stretches its authority to the utter- 
most in the endeavor to enforce absolute morali- 
ties. Government is for the time being well-nigh 
puritanized. 

This has come about elsewhere, and at other 
periods. But why should it come about " down 
South," and now? To explain that, we should 
have to go rather deep into Southern life. To 
explain it fully, we should also have to go rather 

H7 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

far back in Southern history. If we should go 
deep enough and far enough, we should find, I 
think, that the South's present attitude toward the 
railroads and its uprising against the saloon are 
not entirely unconnected. 

Of the earlier changes in Southern life since the 
war, none compares in importance with the po- 
litical revolution of some twenty years ago, when 
politics ceased to be " qualities " in South Caro- 
lina, and "Ben " Tillman succeeded a long line 
of aristocratic governors ; when in State after State, 

— though less violently than in South Carolina, 
because in no other State had the old ruling 
class monopolized political power so jealously or 
set social standards so imperiously, — the "com- 
mon" white man awoke to a sense of his power 
in the body politic. I call that particular change 
a revolution, and would use a stronger term if 
there were one; for no other political movement 

— not that of 1776, nor that of 1 860-1 861 — 
ever altered Southern life so profoundly. 

It is true that the South never was such an 
aristocracy as too many writers about the slavery 
regime, tempted into picturesqueness, would 

148 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

have us think. Always, even in the " blackest " 
counties, in all the States, men who had little land 
and few slaves counted in politics. Many of the 
foremost public characters rose from that class. 
But neither the interests nor the ideals of the plain 
man dominated Southern civilization. Govern- 
ment for the most part responded to the demands 
of wealth invested in land and slaves, and the pre- 
vailing social tradition gave to birth, breeding, 
superiority, greater weight than they had else- 
where in America. Cities being few, it was near 
the outbreak of the Civil War before a com- 
mercial class developed which could challenge 
that tradition. 

Nor did the plain white man come into his 
birthright at once on the fall of slavery. For a 
generation or more, the impoverishment of the 
whole region operated to withold from him the 
opportunities which slavery had so long denied. 
His real enfranchisement came only with the 
gradual dawn of prosperity, and the accompany- 
ing changes in the South's industries. Those 
changes have brought him much the same 
chance in life which he has in the North. And 

149 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

with that there has come to him the new sense of 
independence and power. 

In politics, as he quickly discovered, the sense 
of power was all he needed in order to possess the 
reality. More gradually, and not even yet com- 
pletely, he has come into his own in all those 
subtler ways in which democratic usages and 
ideals supplant the aristocratic. The disfranchise- 
ment of the blacks has in this respect hastened the 
process begun by their emancipation. It has weak- 
ened the prestige of the old slave-owning class, — 
of the men who, living in those quarters where 
negroes are most numerous, not only represented 
the.m, so long as they voted or were supposed to 
vote, in legislatures and democratic conventions, 
but could usually, by appealing to the fear of negro 
domination, dictate party policies. The negro 
eliminated, majority rule seems now to prevail as 
generally among Southern whites as in the North. 
And in the South, as in the North, the great ma- 
jority of the majority are plain or "common" 
men. 

But not quite the same kind of "common" 
men as in the North ; else history were negligi- 

150 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

ble. For one difference, the plain man in the 
South seems to feel a rather deeper distrust of 
capital, a rather angrier hostility to every privi- 
lege of wealth, than one finds in the plain man 
of the North who is not a socialist or aggressively 
a " workingman." Were we to follow that lead, 
and consider carefully the industrial past and the 
economic outlook of the plain Southerner, we 
should, I think, discover why Southern legisla- 
tures have been dealing so drastically with the 
railroads. But for the moment what challenges 
inquiry is the South's fierce awakening to an old 
moral issue, and one naturally turns, therefore, 
to the moral training and standards of the now 
dominant class. 

The word "class" is usually misleading in 
America. One must employ it cautiously. By the 
plain or "common" men of the South I do not 
mean a sort of people that can be clearly separated 
from the rest. I do not mean the vaguely imag- 
ined class which is usually called "poor whites" 
in books about the South by writers who do not 
live there. Those pathetically backward dwellers 
in the mountain regions are still a comparatively 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

negligible factor, save as they have come dov^^n, 
attracted by the tovrn and the factory, and joined 
the greater mass that is both poor and v^^hite, but 
without inverted commas. The really common 
sort of common people have always dwelt in the 
lowlands and the Piedmont region. We need not 
distinguish between the small farmers, on the one 
hand, and the artisans and small shopkeepers of 
the towns, on the other. It is enough if we merely 
exclude all who have a tradition of wealth and 
of political and social ascendancy before the war. 
That means excluding the very attractive people 
of Mr. Thomas Nelson Page's stories. It means 
excluding, I fear, all such people as the South- 
erners one meets in the North lead one to believe 
that they and theirs have always been. 

Now, in the class which we thus deliberately 
neglect as a no longer controlling minority, the 
Episcopal Church has always had its main strength 
in the South. The Southerner of "quality" is 
usually of that religious fold. When he is not, he 
is most likely Scotch-Irish and Presbyterian. In 
South Carolina he might be a French Huguenot; 
in Louisiana and Maryland, a Roman Catholic. 

152 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

The far greater mass of plain people to whom we 
turn are nearly all Methodists or Baptists. 

They take their moral and religious guidance, 
therefore, from a ministry whose methods and 
whose power constitute an important neglected 
fact of Southern life. In both these denomina- 
tions, the proportion of college-bred or otherwise 
cultivated men and women is comparatively small. 
Both inculcate a strict and narrow adherence to 
the scriptural code of morals. Both, for instance, 
frown upon dancing and amateur theatricals. Nei- 
ther requires its ministers to be educated. In both, 
the preaching is for the most part highly emo- 
tional. Both are given to revivals. 

Mr. Walter H. Page and other progressive 
Southerners have spoken bitterly of the Southern 
pulpit as an influence constantly operating to ar- 
rest intellectual development; and that is not the 
only ground on which the Methodist and Baptist 
preachers in particular are open to criticism. But 
on the score of zeal, industry, devotion, these men 
need not fear comparison with any priesthood in 
the world. None too well equipped intellectually, 
and deriving no aid from any superiority in birth 

153 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

or breeding or culture to the people whom they 
serve, they are also generally ill-paid. Many of 
them must maintain families on salaries of four 
or five hundred dollars a year. Yet they rarely 
incur a charge of loitering in the vineyard. They 
preach incessantly ; they make daily rounds of 
visits to the homes of their communicants; they 
act as unpaid canvassers for their denominational 
schools and colleges ; they keep in touch with one 
another, and study their people as closely as the 
most observant politician; they do not neglect 
the ever-widening influence of women. So great 
is the power which they thus collectively exercise 
that if one were to call the plain people of the 
South "priest-ridden," the strongest objection to 
the phrase would be, that the Methodist and Bap- 
tist ministers do not consider themselves priests. 
It is these men in the South who have taken 
the lead in the now almost world-wide movement 
for prohibition. Episcopal clergymen hardly ever 
take an active part in the movement ; not infre- 
quently, they actually oppose it, as not a wise 
or proper method to promote temperance. The 
Catholic clergy, not a great power in the South 

154 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

outside of a few large cities, take the same general 
attitude. Presbyterian ministers, although they 
may favor prohibition, rarely feel free to advocate 
it from the pulpit. But the Baptist and Methodist 
preachers commit themselves to it unreservedly, 
inside and outside the pulpit. They are for pro- 
hibition by local option as against high license and 
dispensaries, but for State prohibition as against 
local option. Temperance they have virtually 
ceased to preach, demanding instead that Govern- 
ment compel all men to become teetotalers. 

And it is their congregations which supply the 
readiest converts to this policy. To the small 
farmer or shopkeeper or artisan of the South, the 
drink habit presents itself in its crudest, least de- 
fensible form. Among people of this class, the 
custom of taking wine with food is virtually un- 
known. Of wines, in fact, the common people of 
the South know so little that they use the word 
"wine" as if there were only one kind of wine 
in the world. Beer, while of course a not uncom- 
mon beverage in the cities, does not find its way 
iiito the country. Accordingly, to drink means 
ordinarily to drink whiskey, and not at table or 

^55 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

in the restraining company of women, but in sur- 
roundings the least conducive to moderation and 
decency. It means, therefore, deplorably often, 
not merely drunkenness, but rowdyism. The greed 
of the liquor-dealers and the brewers behind 
them, and their amazing contempt of public sen- 
timent, have contributed to render the drinking 
habits of the South as unlike as possible to those 
of southern Europe, where wine-drinking is gen- 
eral, even among the peasants, and drunkenness 
extremely rare. Nowhere does the prohibitionist 
agitator, with his terrifying figures and highly 
charged oratory, find a better opening. 

Once the Democratic party, dominant every- 
where in the South, had committed itself to local 
option, prohibition made rapid gains in the rural 
counties and the smaller towns. Two years ago, 
when the movement for State prohibition won its 
first victory (in Georgia), the greater part of the 
South was already under prohibition laws. A year 
ago, the leader in the local-option movement in 
North Carolina ^ pointed out that nine tenths of 

1 Mr. J. W. Bailey, of Raleigh, President of the North Carolina 
Anti-Saloon League, 1903-07. 

156 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

the people of that State were living in prohibition 
territory, and that there were within its limits 
only one fifth as many open saloons as in Kansas, 
which has had State prohibition for a quarter of 
a century. 

The same authority also declares that the South, 
having turned from the local-option plan to State 
prohibition, is now "in full cry on the coldest 
trail in its history." That is an opinion which gets 
much support from the report, ably summarized 
by President Eliot, of the sub-committee on legis- 
lation appointed by the Committee of Fifty, which, 
several years ago, secured for us the most author- 
itative data we have on the liquor problem. But 
the men and women now fighting the saloon in 
the South do not make use of such material as 
the Committee supplies. In a city where, after an 
absorbing campaign, prohibition recently won, 
the copy of "The Liquor Problem" in the pub- 
lic library — quite probably the only copy in town 
— does not seem to have been consulted at all. The 
chairman of the "dry" committee had not even 
heard of the Prohibition Year-Book. The fight 
was won, in fact, mainly by the devices of a Meth- 

^57 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

odist revival or "protracted meeting " : by terrify- 
ing and rather coarsely emotional oratory from 
pulpit and platform, interspersed with singing and 
praying; by parades of women and children, 
drilled for the purpose ; by a sort of persecution, 
not stopping short of an actual boycott, of promi- 
nent citizens inclined to vote "wet"; by the 
Anti-Saloon League's very effective short method 
with politicians, whom it convinces that they 
have more to lose by offending the league than by 
deserting the saloon-keepers ; and finally, by fairly 
mobbing the polls with women and children, 
singing, praying, and doing everything conceiv- 
able to embarrass and frighten every voter who 
appeared without a white ribbon in his lapel. 

It is these methods, gradually perfected in cam- 
paign after campaign, that have won for prohibi- 
tion so many victories in the towns and counties. 
It is the politicians' absolute helplessness against 
such methods, and the success of the Anti-Saloon 
League in its determination to teach them that 
" the most dangerous thing for a politician to 
tamper with is the saloon vote," which has sud- 
denly won over to State prohibition legislatures 

IS8 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

full of men who never before gave any help to the 
temperance cause. 

And it is the dislike of such methods, however 
moral the cause, which must inspire in thought- 
ful, unexcited minds a grave distrust of the per- 
manence of the good results of the movement. 
The depth and sincerity of the present feeling 
against the saloon are beyond question. There is 
in it a moral and religious fervor which reminds 
one of the way the Piagnoni — the white-ribbon- 
ers of Savonarola's time in Florence — drove vice 
and even vanity out of the city by the Arno ; of the 
Puritan revolution in England ; of countless lesser 
social purifications. But one cannot recall the 
achievement of the Piagnoni, as George Eliot has 
portrayed it in " Romola," without recalling also 
the reaction that followed — Dolfo Spini and his 
brutal Compagnacci, Savonarola in the flames, the 
Medici returned. One cannot think of Puritan 
England without remembering also the England 
of the Restoration — the profligate king and bra- 
zen court, the playhouses, which had been closed 
to Shakespeare, reopened to the indecencies of 
Wycherley and Etherege, the shameful tribute to 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

France, the persecuted Milton. One is moved to 
question whether any moral cause is ever perma- 
nently advanced otherwise than by fair appeals to 
a deliberate public opinion and an uninflamed 
public conscience. 

But to admit that reactions always follow vio- 
lent gains, that a penalty is always paid for big- 
otry and intemperate zeal — is not this merely to 
admit that moral progress is wave-like ? As civil- 
ization advances, the reactions may well be less 
and less in proportion to the gains. Moreover, un- 
less long study of Southern history has utterly mis- 
led me, it has always been a mistake to infer 
fickleness, instability of purpose, from the South- 
ern people's almost Latin responsiveness to emo- 
tional appeals. On the contrary, they have often 
displayed an extraordinary steadfastness in courses 
hastily entered upon. No doubt it is too much to 
expect that prohibition will hold all the ground 
it has won and may yet win in the South, or that 
prohibition laws will not, there as elsewhere, often 
fail of enforcement. But the saloon can never be 
again in the South what it has been in the past. 
That the politicians will ever again serve it as they 

i6o 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

once did is not believable. They have been too 
thoroughly, too ludicrously frightened. One may 
even hope that in the long run the open saloon is 
bound to go entirely; that with the opening-up 
of the South to all kinds of education and soften- 
ing and refining influences, the indefensible drink- 
ing customs of most Southerners — as of most 
Americans, indeed — will gradually be changed ; 
and that thus, without any countervailing sacrifice 
of moral independence or personal liberty, drunk- 
enness will grow rare enough to be well-nigh neg- 
ligible. 

That is a great deal to hope. But there is one 
feature of this temperance movement peculiarly 
conducive to hopefulness for Southern civiliza- 
tion. I cannot better indicate what that feature 
is than by pointing out that I have hardly men- 
tioned the negro at all. It is quite probable that 
his presence in the South has influenced some 
white voters. It has doubtless been remembered 
that in race riots whiskey usually plays a part. 
But this argument has not in fact been generally 
employed. On the temperance question, no race 
line has been drawn. Whites and blacks have di- 

i6i 



THE SOUTH AND THE SALOON 

vided on it with little or no reference to its bear- 
ing on their racial relations. For once, it would 
seem as if the South had actually been able to put 
aside the race issue altogether. One is tempted to 
declare that, if it can do that, it can do anything. 

1908. 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S 
OPPORTUNITY 

A STRONG President's power of initiative in 
his own party is very great. It was the will 
of Cleveland that committed the Democrats to 
tariff reform as their main proposal in the cam- 
paign of 1888. In i896,itis true, Cleveland failed 
to hold his party against the free-silver craze ; but 
he made the outcome doubtful for months, not- 
withstanding that his leadership was already greatly 
weakened, and that the heresy, as is now apparent, 
had infected an overwhelming majority of the 
party throughout the country. Had McKinley 
lived, and remained steadfast in the position he 
took in his last public speech, the chances are that 
years ago we should have had some kind of re- 
vision of the tariff by the Republicans. President 
Roosevelt, on the other hand, devoting himself to 
the task of keeping within bounds the corporations 
and trusts, brought his party to an at least normal 
concurrence in his views. 

165 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

The Republican party has greater coherency 
than the Democratic. A Republican President has, 
therefore, a greater power of initiative in his party 
than the Democratic President has in his. The 
present state of both parties gives to President Taft 
an opportunity to exercise this power to extraordi- 
nary ends. If he has the will and the skill, it seems 
probable that he may alter the composition of 
both ; and that he may also alter their geograph- 
ical alignment. To make this plain, it is neces- 
sary to go inside the lines of both, and examine 
the actual groupings of voters as they have been 
revealed by the several elections since the first 
nomination of Mr. Bryan in 1896. 

That nomination, of course, marked the tri- 
umph of the radicals in the Democratic party. It 
also opened the door to the Populists, the mass of 
whom have since entered, or reentered, the Dem- 
ocratic ranks. With this great reinforcement, the 
radicals seem to be still clearly in the majority. 
Their greatest strength is in the West, and they 
have the upper hand in the South. In certain of 
the Eastern States also the element most in sym- 
pathy with them has got control of the party ma- 

166 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

chinery. But this element, made up largely of the 
foreign-born, and strongest in the cities, does not 
fuse readily or completely with the radical faction 
of the West and South, which is, so to speak, 
country-bred ; which is in fact the counterpart in 
all essentials of Jefferson's following and of An- 
drew Jackson's. What specific policies it stands 
for to-day is not of the first importance. In gen- 
eral, it stands for opposition to privilege, particu- 
larly the privilege of wealth, and it readily accepts 
crude devices to equalize opportunity. But Ameri- 
cans of this class have sincere reverences, and pas- 
sionately associate venerated names with every 
new proposal they make. It is no injustice to call 
certain of their proposals a menace to free govern- 
ment; yet it is no more than justice to recognize 
the spirit behind those proposals as the true mili- 
tant spirit of American democracy. That conces- 
sion enables us to see also wherein this home-bred 
and rural radicalism differs from that of the East, 
or, to be more accurate, from that of the cities. 
The spirit of the latter is in fact the spirit of Euro- 
pean democracy. Between the two wings of the 
radical faction there is thus, as there was between 

167 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

Jefferson's ideas and those of the French Revolu- 
tion, more kinship than identity. But conditions 
of life throughout the Republic grow constantly 
more uniform ; the local and peculiar yields to the 
general. Every year America comes into closer and 
closer touch with "abroad" ; the national yields 
to the cosmopolitan, the universal. Discontents 
and aspirations concerning the social order in 
America will, therefore, we may feel sure, tend to 
ally themselves with like discontents and aspira- 
tions in older lands, and become more and more 
frankly socialistic. The best reason given for sup- 
porting Bryan last autumn was that his election 
would put off the day when a really formidable 
socialist party shall throw down its challenge to 
whichever of our two historical parties may still 
survive. 

That argument prevailed, no doubt, with some 
members of the other great Democratic faction, 
whom it is the fashion to call "conservatives," but 
whom, as our party system grows more like that 
of Europe, we would perhaps better call " mod- 
erates." What the Rockingham Whigs were in 
English politics at the time of the American Rev- 

i68 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

olution, these men are in our political life to-day. 
No other political group has so large a proportion 
of men of light and leading ; no other holds so 
steadfastly to definite principles, or to principles 
which history and reason so well approve: yet 
no other, seemingly, has so little chance to come 
into power. Unable either to countenance the 
dangerous vagaries of the radicals now in control 
of their own party or to shut their eyes to what 
they regard as the long subservience of the Re- 
publican party to privilege, they have nevertheless 
learned from their experience in 1896 that it is 
useless to setup a party establishment of their own. 
In 1 904, when the Democratic convention named 
a candidate they could accept, hundreds of thou- 
sands of Bryan's more devoted followers fell away 
from him and left him to mortifying defeat. 
While the radicals control, the moderates are thus 
thrown into a hesitation which is fast becoming 
their chronic state. Some, still clinging to the 
hope of bringing the party back to sound policies, 
keep themselves "regular" as best they can; 
some have become Republicans ; the greater num- 
ber, though believers in party, find themselves 

169 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

forced into the attitude of independents. With the 
true independents, they hold the balance of power 
in many States. This fact came out at the last 
election more strikingly than ever before. In 
twenty-four of the thirty States which elected gov- 
ernors last November, the Democratic candidates 
ran ahead of Bryan, some of them by many thou- 
sands. The aggregate vote for his party's candi- 
dates for governor in those thirty States exceeded 
his vote in the same States by nearly half a mil- 
lion. The figures also illustrate the Democratic 
dilemma. Outside of the Southern and two or 
three of the newer Western States, the dominant 
radicals can hope to win only by putting forward, 
and themselves supporting, candidates acceptable 
to the moderates. The moderates, on the other 
hand, even if they should regain control, could 
not reasonably expect to win outside of the South 
except, possibly, in a few States of the East where 
they are strongest. Under Cleveland, the Demo- 
cratic party made great gains in New England. In 
1890, an actual majority of the Congressmen 
elected in New England were Democrats. Were 
the party again united under a leadership like 

170 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

Cleveland's, and were the tariff the issue, Massa- 
chusetts would to-day be a doubtful State. But 
Cleveland is gone, and the young William E. 
Russell, whom the auguries of happier years 
had seemed to proclaim his successor, went before 
him to the grave. Under its present leadership, 
barring almost inconceivable Republican follies 
or sins, the party can look for nothing in the 
East but sporadic local triumphs, won on local 
issues. Its sole and none too robust hope must 
remain what it was in the recent campaign: to 
keep the South for a base, and make gains in the 
West. 

Its chances in the West would be better if, ih 
the recent contests of the two great Republican 
factions, fortune had favored the losing side. I 
will use the terms "conservative" and "progress- 
ive" to designate these two factions, as best corre- 
sponding to the terms " moderate "and "radicals," 
which I have applied to the Democratic factions. 
The division among the Republicans is, no doubt, 
somewhat less clearly marked than that among the 
Democrats, but it is not less real, and for the time 
being it is more important. It is roughly com- 

171 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

parable with the division of the English Conserva- 
tive party into Tories and Unionists. 

The conservative Republicans stand for the rights 
of property — perhaps it would not be unfair to 
say, for wealth — with a singleness of purpose and 
animus hardly to be matched by the most con- 
servative group in any one of the party systems 
of older countries ; for we have neither an estab- 
lished church nor an aristocracy of blood to inspire 
another kind of conservatism. Like the moderate 
Democrats, they are strongest in the East, but they 
are almost equally strong in the older States of the 
West — the two quarters, it should be observed, 
where the party also is strongest. 

The progressive Republicans, on the other hand, 
are strongest in that farther West, which, through 
the ascendancy of the radicals in the Democratic 
party, has become, with certain of the Border 
States — Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky — 
the true battle-ground in national contests. Of 
the four old "pivotal " States, three — Connecti- 
cut, New York, and New Jersey — are under pres- 
ent conditions safely Republican ; only the fourth, 
Indiana, remains at all doubtful. The creed of 

172 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

the progressives is nowhere fully and clearly for- 
mulated; but they stand for a strong reaction 
against that complacency with private and corpo- 
rate greed into which the party fell so soon after 
the Civil War. Like the Democratic radicals, they 
have felt, and still feel, the impulse of Populism ; 
they have many former Populists in their ranks. 
Some of their leaders, such as Cummins and La 
Follette, seem really to have more in common 
with Bryan than with Republicans like Aldrich 
and Cannon. Their two most distinctive depar- 
tures from the once orthodox Republican attitude 
are their demands for firmer control and closer 
regulation of corporations and for a more liberal 
tariff policy. 

Notwithstanding President Roosevelt's avoid- 
ance of the tariff issue, he made himself the leader 
of the progressive faction; and he made it the 
dominant faction. We can hardly question any 
longer the immediate political expediency of his 
course. To his astuteness, hardly less than to the 
folly of the Democrats and the incompetence of 
their present leaders, his party owes the new grant 
of power which it has won, contrary to all pre- 

173 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

cedents, in the midst of an industrial depression 
following a financial panic. I will not say that 
President Roosevelt should not have credit for 
something better than mere astuteness. His silence 
on the tariff, particularly in view of McKinley's 
remarkable last speech at Buffalo, is hard to con- 
done; but his insistent demand that the great com- 
binations of capital shall obey the laws, violently 
as he sometimes made it, crude as were some of 
his specific proposals, was not merely popular, it 
was right. Had he, on the other hand, allied him- 
self with the conservatives, and ignored the outcry 
against the abuses of corporate power, his party 
would no doubt have had a heartier support both 
from ultra-conservative Republicans and from 
the most conservative element among the mod- 
erate Democrats,; but he would have driven thou- 
sands of progressive Republicans, particularly in 
the doubtful States of the West, out of the party, 
and he would have made it well-nigh impossible 
for moderate Democrats to come into it. 

The victory to which he led the progressives 
was, however, by no means complete. Cannon is 
still Speaker, Aldrich still leader of the Senate, 

174 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

Sherman is Vice-President. It is idle to fancy that 
the great interests against which the progressives 
have made w^ar w^ill not always have strong repre- 
sentation in public life. The new Administration 
faces the same four — or, if we count the inde- 
pendents, the same five — political groups with 
which its predecessor had to deal. 

Should President Taft turn to mere compro- 
mise and conciliation, he may leave them much as 
they are. Should he prove, notwithstanding the ear- 
lier portents, at heart a reactionary,and the conserv- 
atives, strengthened by his favor, come into their 
old ascendancy, the opposition will win recruits 
among the progressive Republicans, the moderate 
Democrats will again waver back toward their old 
party standard, and many independents will go 
with them. A fresh Democratic opportunity will 
be created, and perhaps, after so long chastening, 
the party will be wise enough, by turning to old 
tenets and new leaders, to seize it. Should the Re- 
publican reaction go far enough, it might even 
bring victory within reach of the opposition as 
it is. 

The third course open to the Administration 

^75 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

is that which all signs have indicated that the 
President is minded to take. If he continues to 
insist, less violently than President Roosevelt, but 
not less firmly, that the corporations and " com- 
binations of corporations" shall obey the laws, 
and goes on carefully perfecting the laws which 
aim to control them, he will hold the progres- 
sives of his own party; and if, in addition, he 
proves sincere and determined, and carries his 
party with him, in the effort to squeeze the sheer 
robbery out of the tariff schedules, even though 
the protection, properly so-called, remains, he 
will win over many moderate Democrats, and he 
will commend himself to the independents. Of 
course, he will not please the conservatives — the 
Aldrich-Cannon Republicans. They will fight 
such a policy ceaselessly and resourcefully, and the 
great interests they represent will support them. 
But they will fight inside the party lines ; if de- 
feated, there is no other party to which they can 
turn. In this way, granting ultimatevictory to the 
progressives, they may become, in the actual 
working of the Government at Washington, a 
sort of Center, with conservatives of their own 

176 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

party constituting the Right, and the Democrats, 
under radical control, the Left. 

But in this forecast I have purposely omitted 
to consider a factor which, at present, makes 
against it — which, indeed, makes against any 
conformity of our political life to the normal 
usage and development of representative govern- 
ments. Radical democracy in America draws its 
inspiration from the West, but the base and strong- 
hold of the Democratic party, whether its policy 
is radical or moderate, is still not the West, but the 
South. If, therefore, I have thought that the pres- 
ent Administration may alter the composition 
of our parties, it is partly because I have thought 
that it may also alter their geographical align- 
ment: because it may, if it will, bring us to the 
end — at any rate, to the beginning of the end — 
of the South's political solidarity. 

This is no new hope. On the contrary, it has 
been so often entertained, and so often disap- 
pointed, that one must give better reasons for 
entertaining it again than the mere fact of Re- 
publican gains in the Border States. From 1892 
to 1908, the figures do show a marked progress 

177 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

of the Republicans southward. West Virginia be- 
came first occasionally and then steadily Republi- 
can. Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri have all 
gone Republican in certain elections, and must 
now be accounted doubtful. But the industrial de- 
velopment of West Virginia has so changed its 
population that it is no longer a Southern State. 
Nor can the other three stand for Southern con- 
ditions. In 1904, when Missouri went Republi- 
can, and Kentucky and Maryland divided their 
electoral votes, Mississippi increased her Demo- 
cratic majority. We cannot attribute to this polit- 
ical change of heart in the Border States quite the 
same significance it would have in any one of the 
old Confederate States. It may well be argued that 
in the former the interests which they share with 
the North have simply outweighed those that 
they share with the South. But were Alabama 
and Georgia to go Republican, we should feel that 
the white people of those States had made up 
their minds that they can vote a Republican ticket 
without endangering that to preserve which they 
have so long denied themselves the privilege of 
full political independence. 

178 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

The figures of the election last autumn in the 
distinctively Southern States are thus far more 
significant than those of recent elections in the 
Border States. They showed an increased Repub- 
lican vote in every one of the eleven States of the 
Confederacy, the gains varying from a few hun- 
dreds in Mississippi and South Carolina, where vir- 
tually no Republican party existed, to more than 
13,000 in Tennessee, more than 16,000 in Geor- 
gia, and nearly 34,000 in North Carolina; this 
last being decidedly the greatest gain, absolutely 
as well as relatively, that the party made in any 
State of the Union. 

The figures are really much more significant 
than they seem. In none of these States do more 
than a few thousand negroes go to the polls. As 
the Democratic primaries have long constituted 
the real elections, great numbers of whites also 
neglect to go to the polls on election days. These 
gains were made, therefore, in a total vote far less 
than would have been cast by the same popula- 
tion in the North ; and they are gains of white 
votes. Probably fewer negroes voted for Taft in 
1908 than for Roosevelt in 1904. Some, mindful 

179 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

of Brownsville, voted against him. Of the 114,- 
000 Republican votes cast in North Carolina, cer- 
tainly more than 1 00,000 were cast by white men. 
Although the National Committee refused to 
appropriate a cent to that State, a change of less 
than 12,000 votes would have given it to Taft. 
A change of 9000 votes would have given him 
Tennessee. In Arkansas and Georgia, also, the 
Republicans not only increased their own vote, 
but cut deep into the Democratic majorities. 

Clearly, it would seem, these States are open to 
Republican invasion. How can the Republicans 
best invade them ? We can approach an answer 
by seeking the causes of the change already come 
about. 

There have already occurred, since the South- 
ern people regained control of their own affairs, 
two secessions from the Democratic party in the 
South. First came the Farmers' Alliance-Popu- 
list movement, in the late eighties. An outcome 
of hard times, and Western in its origin, that 
movement took in the South the form of a rebel- 
lion against the aristocratic element which had 
ruled before the Civil War, and which, with the 

180 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

undoing of Reconstruction, had again come into 
power. It was also a sign of growing discontent 
with the methods used to keep the mass of the 
negroes, not then legally disfranchised, from vot- 
ing. It came suddenly, and quickly developed a 
dangerous strength. Reuben F. Kolb, the Popu- 
list candidate for governor of Alabama in 1890, 
was not improbably elected, though never seated. 
In North Carolina, a fusion of Populists and Re- 
publicans won in 1894 and 1896, and sent J. C. 
Pritchard and Marion Butler to the Senate. Ex- 
cept in South Carolina, where Tillman and his 
following had at the start captured the Demo- 
cratic organization, alliances of Republicans and 
Populists prevailed throughout the South until 
1896, when the Democrats came out for free silver 
and the Republicans for the gold standard. After 
that year, the Democratic party in the South, as 
elsewhere, gradually reabsorbed the Populists by 
adopting most of their platform. 

But this caused a second secession, that of the 
moderates, the Cleveland men, who would not 
support Bryan and free silver. These men re- 
turned to the party in 1 904. That was one reason 

181 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

why Roosevelt did not make a better showing in 
the South. But with Bryan again leading the 
Democrats, and a progressive leading the Republi- 
cans, they have again, and in far larger numbers, 
asserted their independence. To the discontent 
with the Democratic candidate and platform there 
is now added a growing disgust with the party it- 
self, which is regarded as unfit for power, and a 
growing hope in the Republican party. 

It is, of course, essential, if the South is to give 
up its solidarity, that the Republican party shall 
commend itself to a majority of the voters in some 
Southern State or States. It cannot ask Southern 
men to vote for policies they disapprove merely 
because it is desirable to have a live Republican 
party in the South, nor even because, by turning 
Republican, they can win for the South a stronger 
voice in all national ajffairs. It cannot ask them to 
do more than vote as they believe. But as a mat- 
ter of fact, while the progressive faction controls 
the Republican party, and the radical faction 
the Democratic, the drift of Southern opinion is 
clearly and strongly Republican. This drift was 
arrested in 1 904 by the nomination of Parker and 

182 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

by the feeling against President Roosevelt be- 
cause he had had Principal Washington to dinner, 
had appointed Crum Collector at Charleston, and 
had closed the post-office at Indianola. It would 
probably be again arrested if either the moderates 
should regain control in the Democratic party or 
the conservatives in the Republican. Were both 
these things to happen, the tide would doubtless 
turn the other way. If, however, present tenden- 
cies shall continue to prevail in both parties, it 
is only a question of time when in more than one 
Southern State those who in their hearts favor the 
Republican party will be — if, indeed, they are 
not already — the majority. But that, unfortu- 
nately, is not enough. It is not enough that South- 
erners should change their faith; they must be 
persuaded that it is safe for them to vote as they 
believe. 

There is no better way to persuade them that it 
is safe — I doubt, indeed, if there is any other way 
— than to make it safe. I believe that the wisest 
course now open to the Republican party — and 
the right course — is to consent, candidly and un- 
equivocally, that it shall be safe. 

183 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

That it has substantially so consented, ever since 
the last Force Bill was killed, is what has made 
possible its recent gains. These became possible, 
not in spite of the laws which operate to disfran- 
chise the mass of the negroes, but because of those 
laws, and because the Republicans had virtually 
accepted them. President Roosevelt had accepted 
them in a published letter, declaring that no one 
of consequence seriously considers punishing the 
South for passing them so long as they are fairly 
enforced. The Supreme Court had refused to de- 
clare them unconstitutional. Congress had acqui- 
esced by inaction. 

This attitude of the three departments of the 
Government, all three being in the hands of 
the Republicans, has encouraged many Southern 
voters to disregard mere platform demands and 
threats. But there are still many other Southern- 
ers who feel differently ; and the insincerity is in 
itself a thing to reprobate, not to condone. The 
time has come for plain speaking on this whole 
subject. The Southern people will not consent 
that their suffrage laws shall be dictated, directly 
or indirectly, from without; and I believe the 

184 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

best Northern opinion also to be that interference 
from without works more harm than good. If it 
did not succeed when the Southern people were 
beaten, impoverished, apparently helpless, is it 
likely to succeed now, when they are erect, pros- 
perous, in full control of their own affairs ? Forty- 
two years ago, overriding President Johnson, and 
disregarding the policy of Lincoln, Congress did 
all that could be done to force the negroes into the 
electorates of the Southern States. For ten hor- 
rible years the National Government bent its vast 
strength to the task of keeping them there. Yet 
to-day there is nothing gained beyond the pro- 
posal of Lincoln in 1864, in his well-known let- 
ter to Governor Hahn of Louisiana: "I barely 
suggest for your private consideration whether 
some of the colored people may not be let in — 
as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially 
those who have fought gallantly in our ranks." 
One of the few things which seem to be certain 
about the race problem is that the rest of the 
country cannot control, however it may disturb, 
the political relations of the two races in the 
South. 

185 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

Should the Republican party again attempt 
what it cannot hope to accomplish, it would 
merely drive the Southern white voters back into 
the solidarity they seem ready to abandon. If it 
continues to threaten in platforms what it does not 
mean to attempt, it will probably mislead many 
of both races, to the good of neither, and may in 
the end disgust both. By honesty and candor, it can 
permit the stronger, and may perhaps lead the en- 
franchised members of the weaker also, to divide 
freely, like other Americans, according to their 
convictions, at the polls. Since whatever of the 
substance of political power black men now have 
in the South they have by the consent of the 
Southern white men, they would lose little by the 
change; and there remains the untried hope of 
their wisest leader that they may gain from the 
unforced sense of justice of the white race what 
its stubborn strength would never yield to com- 
pulsion. 

But there is more for the Republican party to 
do, if it would rise to its opportunity in the South, 
than merely to cease from this insincerity. It is 
not enough merely to induce Southern white men 

i86 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

to vote Republican in national elections. When 
they do that, they are debarred, not only by party 
law but by a public opinion which on this point 
is peculiarly strong in the South, from the Demo- 
cratic primaries. Yet in too many Southern States 
mere self-respect has hitherto been enough to keep 
such men out of the organizations which repre- 
sent the Republican party. These must simply be 
reconstituted before Southern white men of the 
class which the party has the best chance of win- 
ning will consent to join it. 

Here is perhaps the most difficult practical 
aspect of the situation ; and here the task which 
most clearly devolves upon the President in his 
capacity of party leader. The power long pos- 
sessed by small groups of office-brokers and ven- 
dors of delegates in national conventions must be 
put into better hands, and the organization made, 
as the phrase is, " respectable." The new recruits, 
drawn largely from the higher walks of Southern 
life, and the men who have been Republicans in 
years when the term carried reproach, must be 
brought into some kind of fellowship. Offices and 
honors must be fairly distributed. Were there no 

187 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

Federal offices to distribute, the transformation, 
as Mr. Taft himself once suggested, might be 
easier. For the transformation will not be ac- 
complished until victory at the polls, not recog- 
nition from Washington, shall become the goal 
of party activity. 

To President Roosevelt, notwithstanding what 
I cannot help thinking the serious and costly mis- 
takes in his Southern policy, we must give credit 
for blazing the way for this enterprise of revital- 
izing his party in the South.' Before he went into 
office, he had discussed the situation with South- 
erners of the best class, and had come to feel that 
Southern people had a real grievance in the un- 
representative character — and none too seldom 
the bad character — of holders of Federal offices 
in the South. He accordingly made up his mind 
to appoint Democrats freely where he could not 
get good Republicans. This he repeatedly did, to 

^ I wish to make this acknowledgment the more pointed because I am 
satisfied that in an article published during the campaign of 1908, having 
been somewhat misled by a certain published statement about the so- 
called "referee system," and by the strong feehng of certain Southern 
Republicans against that system, and the article itself having been written 
under peculiar circumstances which' denied me all opportunity to verify 
or correct it, I did President Roosevelt some injustice in this regard. 

188 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

the improvement of the public service; and by 
this policy he fostered a friendlier feeling toward 
his party. Another resolve he made was to appoint 
comparatively few negroes to office, and those, if 
possible, of the better class ; and this also was wise. 
Unfortunately, however, he chose Charleston — 
of all places — for one such appointment to a con- 
spicuous office ; and this, with his " door of hope'* 
letter, and the other incidents I have mentioned, 
exasperated the whites, aroused wild expectations 
among the negroes, provoked an outburst of race 
feeling, and deprived him, for a time, of the liking 
of the Southern people, whom he had at first 
much attracted. 

His policy required him to disregard the advice 
of his party's committees in the South when he 
felt that he could not trust them to name good 
men; yet recommendations from some source he 
must have. He accordingly had recourse to the 
much-discussed " referees." He did not, as has 
been commonly supposed, invent the "referee 
system" of appointments. More than one of his 
predecessors, in making appointments in States 
that had no Senators or Representatives of the 

189 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

President's party, had resorted to advisers of their 
own choosing. Mark Hanna, in nominating Mc- 
Kinley, had built up a "machine" in the South, 
and the heads of this had become, under Mc- 
Kinley, the "referees" concerning appointments 
in their several States. To these men President 
Roosevelt also turned, and he continued the prac- 
tice, although in some instances he changed the 
referees themselves. In Mississippi, he made a 
Democrat the referee ; in many other instances he 
consulted Democrats about appointments. All this 
made, on the v^^hole, for better appointments ; but 
it had other results not so acceptable. It might 
have been foreseen, one would think, that to the 
keen-scented hunger of office-seekers the true 
sources of presidential favor would not remain 
long hidden. It did not, for instance, long remain 
hidden that a Democrat appointed to the Federal 
bench in Alabama owed his appointment to Prin- 
cipal Washington, or that the same adviser had 
actually named the referee for Mississippi ; and the 
effect on Southern public opinion was not good. 
The referees found it easy, when they so desired, 
to make themselves the masters of the Republi- 

190 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

can organizations in their respective States; for 
these turned to whatever power dispensed the 
offices, as a sunflower turns to the sun. It has even 
been charged that in Mississippi the referee used 
his power — as he could, since many of the ap- 
pointments made on his recommendation Vere of 
Democrats — to aid in a contest for control of 
the Democratic party. He is also blamed for the 
unsatisfactory outcome of the Indianola incident, 
because of the advice he gave the President. In 
general, since the referees were responsible only 
to the President, their setting up, however good 
the motive, and however the device may have im- 
proved the character of appointments, certainly 
did not give to the Republican party the vitality 
and independence which it so sadly lacked. Presi- 
dent Roosevelt abandoned the system some time 
before he went out of office. It is quite possible 
that the standard of appointments to Federal offi- 
ces will somewhat decline if the party commit- 
tees are left to make the recommendations ; but in 
the end the South will be the gainer if the change 
shall prove a sign of the coming to life of the 
party behind the committees. 

191 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

But the Administration, if it would contribute 
all it can to this consummation, must go further 
still. It must see to it that the men at the head of 
the Southern machines shall realize that their old 
occupation — the getting together of pliable dele- 
gations to Republican national conventions — is 
gone forever. So long as this practice continues, 
there will exist, for the leaders of the party in the 
South, whether referees or committeemen, and 
for the Northern managers in closest touch with 
them also, a motive to keep things as they have 
been. 

Here, it may be thought, is too much said of 
the South in a survey of the entire national field. 
But those who know the true history of the Re- 
publican party in recent years will hardly make 
that criticism. Nor is it just, if the view here taken 
of the present state of parties throughout the na- 
tion is correct. In that view, the rise of the Repub- 
lican party in the South may be compared, in its 
potential effects upon our national politics, to the 
emergence of Japan into the field of international 
politics. The entrance of a new power may com- 
pel realignments of the old, with new alHances, 

192 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

new policies ; it may well mark the beginning of 
a new epoch in our political life. 

To welcome the new is not to revile the old. If 
the South should to-morrow drop her guard, and 
throw away her shield, the act would imply no 
self-condemnation for the response she made to 
the desperate conditions which she faced forty 
years ago. If it be said that mere sentiment has 
governed her course, the answer is ready : mere 
sentiment is a nobler motive than mere self-inter- 
est. But sentiment has not been all : far from it. 
Interests more precious than are commonly de- 
bated in politics have seemed to force her into po- 
litical isolation. Glorious as freedom is, it has often 
in history been accounted noble for men to deny 
themselves its fullness, and live withdrawn from 
power, and cabined from their fellows' emulations, 
when they have felt themselves custodians of some 
priceless heritage of principle ; and this, beyond 
question, has been the South's own conception of 
her long recalcitrancy. 

Yet it has cost her dear; and she, most of all, 
should welcome the new day — if this brightness is 
indeed the dawn. Her best minds have long yearned 

193 



PRESIDENT TAFT'S OPPORTUNITY 

forward to it, as to the day when they might keep 
faith with their country without disloyalty to their 
homes, to their race. Nor do they of that other 
race, because of whom there has been this long 
tribulation, desire that the new day shall not dawn. 
Their full hope, and the full hope of their cham- 
pions, is yet denied. We have not gone beyond 
the modest hope of Lincoln. But at least that 
modest and reasonable hope is accomplished ; and 
this achievement may prove the safe foundation 
of a greater hope. It will at least avail to fulfill 
Lincoln's prophecy. It will serve — in his own 
deep phrase — "to keep the jewel oflibertyinthe 
family of freedom." 
1909. 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 



G 



TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

MARCH 4, 1909 

OOD-MORNING, Mr. President! and. 



yes — au revoirl though not good-bye! 

It is hard going to the side Hnes. You yourself 
never willingly made way for any one — except, 
perhaps, your successor. We wish we could leave 
out the " perhaps." But we are speaking candidly 
— so candidly that we will admit we find it hard 
to believe that even you never have longed for 
that which some often supremely desire — ob- 
scurity ; some, indeed, so intensely that they would 
not envy a lion his morsel. 

The "perhaps " must stay, and with it a thou- 
sand doubts. This question of what sort of man 
you are at heart has been, for years now, probably 
the commonest single topic of conversation in 
America. How you have become so conspicuous, 
so unavoidable, we think we can see. Decidedly 
you are not lazy. The thought of that incessant, 
demoniac energy of yours is to the indolent and 

197 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

ease-loving among us like a lash. And in all your 
activity there is the instinct of success. Although 
you did not shine at school or college, you won 
from youth precisely the kind of training that 
counts in getting on. The very swiftness of your 
activities explains their success. And this goes 
deeper than it sounds. You act on first impulses, 
after a quick glance at situations, but with no more 
pondering than the average man will give. You 
thus, as a rule, hit upon courses which the aver- 
age man — particularly the average man of affairs 
— is likely to approve. Of course, you have not 
time to ponder; but neither is that your bent. No 
act of yours has the quality of a work of patient 
art — as so many of Lincoln's had ; nor has your 
speech the sweetness of meditation. Both suit 
newspapers better than they will suit books; but 
your countrymen read newspapers more than they 
read books. 

This quality of your acts we cannot condemn. 
No mortal could give finish to all you do. But we 
do condemn the way you belabor us who do not 
totally approve — and praise — all you do. That is 
the most exasperating of your injustices. You tell 

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GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

us vehemently how you and your friends value 
their honor above all things, and yet you freely 
and violently assail the good names of other men. 
Many you denounce for lying ; yet it is the sim- 
ple truth that thousands of your countrymen ques- 
tion your veracity. 

For a while success threw such a glamour over 
you that we could only think of you as paragon 
or as arch-villain. It is curious how that illusion 
about men lifted up persists — when we know they 
must be like the rest of us. We do not believe all 
your opponents have been liars; nor yet that you 
yourself have been lying incessantly and con- 
sciously. It is plain that you put your side of every- 
thing too strongly. A whisper in the White House 
turns to thunder out of doors; but you have 
seemed to think you would not be heard unless 
you shouted. You are of those who use speech as 
means to all manner of ends. But even in this 
respect you may be a sign of moral progress ; for 
even in this respect we must, we think, account 
you more scrupulous than Napoleon. 

You will not wonder that we mention such a 
name. Many will. But you do indeed set us look- 

199 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

ing for European counterparts. Asa spectacle your 
career could stand a European, even an Asiatic, 
setting. In this you may have served us well. Eu- 
rope seems to find you like her own rulers, to 
understand and respect your demonstrations of our 
strength. Nevertheless, you have more in com- 
mon with Andrew Jackson, of Tennessee, than 
with Czar or Emperor. He, too, you remember, 
was violent in loyalties and hatreds. He, too, kept 
his prestige to the end, and named his successor. 
Of course you are more than the frontiersman. 
City-bred and college-bred and traveled, you range 
beyond his narrow ken — and boldly essay full 
citizenship of every province your mind explores. 
But if you are more than he could be, may you not 
also be less? Can you match his sincerities — or 
his manners? 

He was not a politician ; and we long thought 
you were not. Now we know better. In politics, 
as in all things, you choose to win, with such 
devices as winning demands. You are right, we 
suppose, if life is. Going below these complex 
relations of men does not bring us to any coun- 
tenancing by nature of abstentions in strife. You 

200 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

despise the negative heroisms and moralities ; we 
will not question whether you could attain them. 
With your doctrine and life principle of self- 
assertion, you have achieved a career in many 
ways splendid and glorious : we will not ask if you 
could have accepted a martyrdom, or lived through 
a life of self-abnegation. 

Are there such lives ? Sacrifice, humility, some- 
times seem to us forms of self-seeking. The 
stormiest activity may be in truth a kind of yield- 
ing, as when Gladstone in agony turned from the 
church to the senate to work out a mystical con- 
secration. Your ceaseless grasping at every means 
to achievement is compliance; there is in it what 
Swift called "the sting of perishable things." You 
are driven upon self-assertion as spirits equally 
ardent have been driven to the cloister. 

It is yet too early to say what will be the per- 
manent effect of your policies and methods on our 
actual constitution of government; or whether 
your party will hold to the course you have set it. 
The old questions of finance and the tariff you 
have left much as you found them. A true politi- 
cal instinct and sense of the movement of the 



201 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

popular mind turned you instead to your resound- 
ing assault upon trusts, of which there is as yet no 
clear outcome. You are best out of doors. Com- 
ing generations will have most cause to think well 
of you when they take thought of things mate- 
rial : of deserts reclaimed and forests preserved, 
and the canal, perhaps, and the inland waterways. 
It is idle to inquire precisely how far these con- 
serving enterprises are yours. You have success- 
fully appropriated them, as you successfully ap- 
propriated certain policies of the party opposed 
to you. Such depredations are the rule in politics. 
Avoidances such as yours of the tariff are equally 
the rule. You have accomplished things which 
presidents of the older school would not have 
dared attempt, by methods they could hardly have 
imagined ; and only time can determine which of 
your innovations will persist. You have excelled 
rather in the multitude of things done and striven 
for than in any kind of forbearance. In this, again, 
there is a kind of reassurance. Institutions which 
can permit such a man so much freedom, and 
which he yet does not obviously subvert, must 
have their roots deep in the popular conscious- 

202 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

ness. They will long continue to set bounds to per- 
sonal force in our public men. You have possessed 
and exercised our government; you could not, if 
you had desired and dared, have essentially altered 
its forms. Willingly or unwillingly, you have even 
respected^ the mere tradition which denied you 
longer possession. What you have, in fact, seemed 
to demonstrate is that our system contemplates 
energy and aggression in its highest office. 

Do you wonder that there is so little asperity in 
all this ? We choose to be too serious for irony, or 
for that ridicule which you so constantly chal- 
lenge and so frenziedly resent. Because it is the 
form of attack you resent least well, we discard it 
— to say au revoir. We can think of no other pub- 
lic man since Andrew Johnson so plainly pervious 
to gibes. That circumstance indicates, better, per- 
haps, than any other sign, the sense of you which 
will go into history. It will leave your eulogists free 
to compare you with Napoleon and Frederick the 
Great. It will debar them from associating you 
with that small group among the famous men of 
action whom a Voltaire or a Madame de Stael 
would have found it useless to assail, and who 

203 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 
would certainly never have persecuted any man 
or woman for pen-pricks. Hampden, we should 
say, was of that group, and Lincoln, and General 
Lee. For these were of those who have believed 
— we will not say rightly — that ruling one's own 
spirit is greater than taking cities; of those who 
practiced the emphasis of quietness. If you were 
set beside one of that group, before a Greek of 
the time of Pericles, he would see, better than we 
your countrymen can, wherein your success is 
failure. 

We make concessions, Mr. President, — and we 
admit doubts. We are trying, in parting, to adhere 
to an attitude of sympathy. If we do not think 
we should have done so ill in your place, we are 
quite sure we should not have done so well. We 
are willing, if time shall prove your champion, to 
grow more and more reconciled into admiration. 
But we remember, or seem to remember, a kind 
of charm you had in years gone by which this 
so wonderful fruition of manhood does not yield ; 
and we recall some words spoken by a young 
man as he parted from those same quiet places 
where your own youth was nurtured. He also be- 

204 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

came a man of action — a soldier; he was the very 
man who fell 

" Tipping with fire the bolt of men 
That rived the rebel line asunder." 

This is what he said: " Apollonius of Tyana tells 
us in his Travels that he saw * a youth, one of the 
blackest of the Indians, who had between his eye- 
brows a shining moon. Another youth, named 
Memnon, the pupil of Herodes the Sophist, had 
this moon when he was young; but as he ap- 
proached to man's estate its light grew fainter and 
fainter and finally vanished.' The world should see 
with reverence on each youth's brow, as a shining 
moon, his fresh ideal. It should remember that he 
is already in the hands of a sophist more danger- 
ous than Herodes, for that sophist is himself. It 
should watch lest, from too early or exclusive ac- 
tion, the moon on his brow, growing fainter and 
fainter, should finally vanish, and, sadder than all, 
should leave in vanishing no sense of loss." 

And yet — and yet — au revoir, Mr. President. 
Au revotr — but not good-bye. 



G 



TO WILLIAM H. TAFT 

MARCH 4, 1909 

OOD-MORNING, Mr. President. 



To you also we prefer to turn with serious 
eyes. Solemnities drop less naturally from our pen, 
we must own, in this greeting than in that tenta- 
tive farewell we have just been pronouncing. We 
can imagine you saying what Charles Surface said 
while Sir Oliver paid his respects to Brother Jo- 
seph : " If they talk this way to Honesty, what will 
they say to me by and by ?'* And we cou/d Ml into 
that mood; for, strange to say, we seem less in 
doubt about you at your coming in than about this 
other at his going out. Certainly you do not sug- 
gest painful reflections on the mysteries of human 
nature and life and fate. Rather you invite to jo- 
viality and matter-of-fact. 

But we are to watch your every act, listen to all 
your words, to praise and dispraise you, for four 
years, perhaps for eight. Frankly, we have much 
hope in you, and it is hard to believe we shall ever 

206 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

feel bound to assail you with bitterness, to taunt, to 
deride. You have our liking — in common, we 
think, with that of nearly all your countrymen. 
But you know how hard it will be to keep from 
losing this well-nigh universal good-will. For 
Lord Russell was right, and the poet wrong. Gov- 
ernment causes and cures countless ills. You can- 
not for a day exercise your vast powers without 
helping and hurting thousands. Wise or unwise, 
right or wrong, your acts will cut deep into hu- 
man lives. We trust that you sleep well. 

Frankly, again, there have been some things we 
do not like. Like your predecessor you in your 
youth revolted against that system of so-called pro- 
tection which, in its present phase, we count an 
indefensible surrender, first of your party, and then 
of the government, to greed ; and you, like him, 
have failed to defend in plain words this acquies- 
cence of manhood against that rebellion of youth. 
When you touched upon your change of heart, 
speaking to young faces, in the place of your 
youth, your words went lame. You said then that 
you still approved of your youthful principles, 
that you held them still orthodox and sound — 

207 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

"if only the application of them is not carried to 
such an extreme as to interfere with the public 
welfare." You certainly cannot believe that free 
trade or any other laissez-faire principles run riot 
in our present tariff laws. Now that you have de- 
clared yourself a protectionist, however, we will not 
ask you to act as if you had never ceased to be a 
free-trader. We should like you to study the life 
of Sir Robert Peel. But we will be content for the 
present if you will merely bring us back to pro- 
tection — if you will merely insist that Congress 
shall squeeze the sheer robbery out of the sched- 
ules, although the real protection remains. All you 
have said since election day indicates that this is 
your purpose. Since you have progressed thus far, 
we have our hopes concerning the next step. 

Frankly, again, we could wish there had been in 
your campaigns for the nomination of your party, 
and then for election, less apparent dependence on 
the help and favor of your predecessor. It gave, 
alike to your rivalry with other leaders in your own 
party and to your contest with the candidate of the 
opposition, a character not unexampled in our his- 
tory. That Van Buren was similarly championed 

208 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

has not been to his credit with historians. But we 
Americans understand personal loyahies, and re- 
spect them, too, when they do not mean disloy- 
ahy to principle or to us. Let us feel that in office 
you hold yourself responsible only to us and to 
principle, and we will not malignantly keep you in 
mind of the manner of your elevation. But we do 
not envy you the difficult choices you will have to 
make between independence and gratitude. There 
is but one safe rule, we think. Do the right, and 
be careless of interpretations. We shall probably 
understand and approve ; but since you are only 
one man, charged with the interests of millions, it 
is not quite of the first importance whether we do 
you justice or not. 

Frankly, again, we do not like your apparent 
participation in an insincerity which your party 
has too long practiced successfully. Every four 
years it goes before the country with words which 
can only be interpreted as a demand for interfer- 
ence by the Government of the nation between the 
two races now living together in great numbers in 
the Southern States ; and yet, though in full con- 
trol of all departments of that Government, your 

209 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

- '3 

party takes no such action as it seems to demand. 
We could dismiss the practice as harmless, since it 
deceives few; but lying is objectionable in itself. 
It is uncomplimentary in this instance to the intel- 
ligence of the country, and particularly to that of 
the unfortunate race most concerned. We believe 
you will in time set yourself against this practice. 
For of the things we like there is none we like 
better than your impassioned declaration in the 
heat of your campaign that you did not wish to be 
President of half your country, and your decision 
to break all precedents of nearly half a century 
and go and offer yourself in person to our fellow- 
citizens of the South. We cannot help thinking 
that your thorough awareness of our place in the 
world as one great republic prompted you to this 
manliness and candor. We cannot afford to keep a 
Poland, an Ireland, in our system. But sheer senti- 
ment played its part. You would be rid of the 
dominance of "old, unhappy, far off things." 
You know already how warmly the South re- 
sponds to your challenge. We think we can assure 
you that your course has alienated no Northern 
friends worth keeping. 

2IO 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

Of course the problem of the African in our 
body politic, as in our industries, our social rela- 
tions, remains. You do not, we are sure, fancy you 
have solved it ; nor are we ready to tell you how to 
solve it. We are not at all sure there is any solu- 
tion, and fancy it may be misleading to use that 
word, or "problem," at all. What we have to do 
with is a situation, a condition, desperately perma- 
nent, yet measurably changing and changeable. 
No mere ingenuity will transform it. Evasion and 
dodging will not avoid it. Violence usually height- 
ens the difficulties inseparable from it. It will al- 
ways be in your power to stir its embers into angry 
flames; your power to alter it for the better is 
doubtful. We commend to you, therefore, the 
spirit and the methods, the infinite patience and 
sweet reasonableness, of that one among your pre- 
decessors who did, in fact, nevertheless deal with 
this perplexing situation more boldly than any one 
else ever did. You are less fortunate than he, in 
that to him it presented a reasonably plain ques- 
tion of right and wrong. You are more fortunate, 
in that you can freely take counsel with the true 
and accepted representatives of both these great 

211 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

masses of human beings, who find their desti- 
nies linked together under our flag. We are con- 
fident that at least you will not, by flying in the 
face of facts, and contradicting racial human na- 
ture, aggravate what you cannot alleviate, merely 
disturb what you cannot change ; yet that no force 
or agency which makes for human progress will 
find cause to upbraid you for coldness or neg- 
lect. 

We are glad you have been a judge. Granting 
you consecration instead of ambition, we think you 
will find that to do justice among men will be 
your most constant function, though you wear no 
ermine. Our hope is the greater, because you have 
propounded no theory of life, profess no allegiance 
to any one principle in your own life, but have 
merely risen from task to task by virtue of effici- 
ency and good nature. You will not set obiter dicta 
above decisions. The case itself will be your busi- 
ness, and you will wait for cases to come up before 
you decide them. 

In nothing will that habit and procedure serve 
you better than in your effort, following your pre- 
decessor's lead, to make government stand for right 

212 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

as between man and man, class and class, force and 
force, in all its relations to our appallingly complex 
industrial system. To proceed from one specific 
evil to another, to formulate no rules not based on 
actual experience, to try no mere experiments — 
to go on step by step — this, simple as it seems, is 
the sole secret of England's success in free gov- 
ernment. She arrives at generalizations only by 
amassing precedents. Her genius is the distrust 
of genius, and her caution and foresight consist in 
keeping pace with the demands of her civilization, 
not in running ahead to meet them. 

It is better to go slowly than to go wrong. You 
do not possess, we do not think you imagine that 
you possess, the colossal genius to direct into new 
channels the immense social forces now contend- 
ing on this continent as on others, to devise and 
impose a new plan for producing and distributing 
wealth. But you have the training and knowl- 
edge to correct abuses of the plan now in opera- 
tion. At many points we have broken with the 
individualism of the past, though we once thought 
it the essence of our democracy. Perhaps we are 
moving toward socialism. If it is the best and final 

213 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

form of society, however, we shall attain it with- 
out forcing our pace. We do not know our goal, 
and must yet hold fast to all that has proved 
soundest in our past experience. 

Your limitations, therefore, commend you, 
Mr. President. Our greeting is the more cor- 
dial because we do not take you, and you do not 
take yourself, for a man of destiny ; because we 
are not moved to make our salutation an obei- 
sance. 

Nevertheless, we commend to you all the in- 
spiration to be got from considering the magni- 
tude of your trust, the terrible height to which 
you are lifted up by our will and choice. Your 
station is like Cesar's, or Charlemagne's. It is not 
less because railroad and steamship, electricity 
and the press, bring far things near and make the 
mysterious commonplace. Because you hold it, 
Europe and Asia are daily mindful of you. Main- 
tain it, then, as we have no doubt you will, with 
dignity, and be conscious always that the great 
mass of your countrymen, of all races and parties 
and creeds, know instinctively the line between 
that criticism and opposition which a republic 

214 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

permits and that which patriotism sternly for- 
bids. 

Good-morning, Mr. President — and good 
fortune ! 



G 



TO WILLIAM H. TAFT 

MARCH 4, 19 I 3 

OOD-EVENING, Mr. President. 



And pray believe us when we assure you 
of the same hearty good will with which we bade 
you good-morning four years ago. You were then 
taking up the most difficult of roles, and we sin- 
cerely wished you well in it. To-day, in laying 
down your great office, you are taking up a role 
almost equally difficult — that of a private citizen 
who has been President. In that role, too, we 
heartily wish you well. 

More than that, Mr. President : the good will 
of a single journal is not important, but we are 
also convinced, strange as it seems in view of the 
overwhelming character of your defeat, that you 
still have the good will of the mass of your coun- 
trymen. Not of all, of course. You have been 
assailed with almost unexampled bitterness, and 
we cannot doubt that a considerable number of 

216 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

your assailants sincerely felt the animosity they 
expressed. Perhaps we should go further still and 
concede that this animosity can by no means be 
attributed entirely to personal disappointments 
and resentments. Much of it doubtless comes of 
a respectable and citizenly disapproval of what, as 
President, you have done and failed to do. Never- 
theless, we are quite sure that in respect of the 
real feeling of the mass of your countrymen to- 
ward you the tone of the press and other organs 
of public sentiment is a better criterion than the 
returns of the election. As you fortunately pos- 
sess a sense of humor, we venture to assure you 
that we, the people, have voted you out of office 
with much the same friendliness with which we 
called you to our highest service. 

Here, you will agree, is matter for reflection. 
An epigram promptly suggests itself: The man 
is popular, but not the President. But we do not 
like epigrams. They get rid of difficulties ; they 
do not solve them. This one does not explain the 
disappointment of your Administration. For it 
has been a disappointment, a great disappoint- 
ment. With your admirable candor you have 

217 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

frankly told us that you yourself share with us all 
precisely that feeling about it. 

Why, then, has it been a disappointment? 

Assured of our liking, you will not resent our 
cognizance of the harshest view of the matter. In- 
deed, you have come near taking it yourself, for 
from the beginning you have expressed doubts of 
your fitness for the presidency, along with a pref- 
erence for another kind of public service — 
namely, the judicial. Looking at the matter 
broadly, we feel bound to agree with you, though 
we nevertheless admire rather than merely depre- 
cate the several decisions you have made to go 
contrary to your own self-knowledge ; for we be- 
lieve that you took the presidency, as you took 
the governorship of the Philippines, from a sense 
of duty and not from preference. Still, we do 
agree with you, and mainly for the reason you 
yourself have given — to wit, that you are not a 
politician. 

Do not mistake us ; we mean no flattery ; we 
use the word in its proper sense, and not at all 
as a term of reproach. For four years politics has 
been your business; and it is not a low business. 

218 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

It is really a high and noble business. That low 
men, governed by low motives, constantly engage in 
it does not prove the contrary. The abuse of polit- 
ical skill by such men — the Cardinal Antonellis, 
the Marats, the Burrs and Quays and Platts — 
makes no case against the splendid use of it, for 
the welfare of great communities, by the Cavours 
and Bismarcks, the Gladstones and Jeffersons and 
Lincolns. 

That skill, that art, for it is an art, you clearly 
have not possessed. The want of it is quite as ap- 
parent in the most praiseworthy as in the least 
defensible of your presidential endeavors. When 
you set yourself to establish the entirely sound 
policy of reciprocity with Canada, you defended 
it with an indiscretion of speech that potently 
helped its enemies to defeat it. When, with the 
best of motives, you essayed to conciliate the 
South, you fatuously continued to listen to coun- 
sels which you should have known would be fatal 
to that patriotic enterprise. Worst of all, after 
fully committing yourself to the plan of an hon- 
est Republican revision of the tariff and leading 
the country to expect, as you yourself expected, 

219 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

that it would be a revision downward, you put 
yourself and your policy into the hands of men 
whom every instinct of a true politician would 
have prompted you to distrust. Then you capped 
the climax by accepting, at the worst moment, 
the worst conceivable advice, and in violation of 
your own good nature, your own sense of justice, 
you used your power of patronage against men you 
should have trusted and in behalf of men who 
had undone you. It was a thing to make the 
angels weep. We cannot forbear reminding you 
— though perhaps you never knew it — of how, 
at that crisis of your career, we fairly went on our 
knees to you to take the opposite course. 

It was lamentable. To great numbers of your 
countrymen it was also the cruelest of political 
surprises. For they had known you as an admir- 
able judge ; competent critics have said, a great 
judge. But to review action judicially, justly, is 
one thing ; to use good judgment in the stress of 
action is another thing — and the higher of these 
two gifts you have not displayed. You have also 
failed to display certain other gifts that go to make 
a great Executive, a great man of affairs, a great 

220 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

politician. You have shown good sense, but not 
inspiration ; sound principles, but not the grand 
style in presenting and defending them ; you have 
the power of clear and reasonable speech, but 
none of the eloquence that stirs the blood and 
moistens the eyelids; you win men's liking, but 
not their devotion. 

And yet, by the irony of fate, it was your lot 
to face a situation from which only a very great 
politician could have emerged with credit ! You 
were the leader of a party which had lost its pris- 
tine virtue, which had fallen under evil influ- 
ences, which was already breaking into bitterly 
hostile factions. You were the chosen heir of a 
great political charlatan, who thus left you to face 
the dangers he had himself avoided; of a man 
who, having sown the wind, permitted you, in 
the name of friendship, to reap the whirlwind. 

Well, you have reaped it; in the language of 
the street, which even Shakespeare sometimes 
found indispensable, you have "got what was 
coming to you." Your party is disrupted. Your 
administration is accounted a failure. And the 
man whom you thought your best friend, and 

221 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

who had the most to do with your elevation, has 
sought to win his own way back into power on 
the strength of your discomfiture ! 

Why, then, do you ask, are not we also, and 
others like us, since we began as your good- wish- 
ers, now reproaching you ? The best answer, Mr. 
President, is the smile on your own lips, the twin- 
kle in your eye, the undiminished sanity of your 
entire deportment. You have lost, but you are a 
good loser. You have been humiliated, but you 
have not whined or whimpered or sunk into 
melancholy. Best of all, you have not sought to 
throw the blame on your associates and subordi- 
nates. If you have failed as President, neverthe- 
less, as an American man — 

But no, the epigram is still misleading. Even as 
President you have had successes. Even when, 
as President, you have seemed to fail most obvi- 
ously, there is room to question whether the fail- 
ures may not have been in some measure only 
apparent, only temporary. You did not persuade 
your party to revise the tariff honestly; in the 
crucial moments of that struggle you were piti- 
ably hoodwinked. Nevertheless, you have faced 

222 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

the issue, you have not run away from it ; and 
therefore the reform is imminent. In that regard 
the outcome of your leadership still permits, as 
its beginning suggested, a comparison with Sir 
Robert Peel's. Seemingly, you have failed, too, 
in your still more commendable endeavor, stead- 
fast and long continued, to quiet the mood of 
wild expectation in which, by the extraordinary 
vagaries of your predecessor, your countrymen 
had been left. That mood still prevails ; there is 
still danger that it will, before it wanes, do some 
damage to our institutions. But your steadfastness 
in sanity has not been altogether wasted. What 
is left of your party still stands for preservation, 
not for destruction, for sense and not for sheer and 
unruled impulse. Even in the loftiest and boldest 
of your enterprises, you have not failed entirely. 
The arbitration treaties are indeed emasculated; 
we do not wonder that you hesitate to sign them. 
But they are not dead. It is quite believable that 
a century hence they will be accounted the begin- 
ning of the world's permanent peace. The glory 
of it will be America's, even if it is not yours. 
In all probability glory will not be your por- 
223 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

tion, Mr. President, We are speaking with entire 
candor and that is our impression, as it is also, 
quite likely, your own. Still, we know what 
changes time can work concerning the esteem 
of Americans for their Presidents. It is even now 
working a great change concerning the reputa- 
tion of your unfortunate Ohio predecessor. Pres- 
ident Hayes. To the multitude his name is still 
a signal for ignorant depreciation. Nevertheless, 
to the trained and competent historians who are 
beginning to review his administration he appears 
more and more as a man greatly underestimated, 
as a President who, notwithstanding the cloud 
which will always rest upon his name, rendered 
to the American people services that are simply 
incalculable. He was the true initiator of civil- 
service reform; he was the first President after 
Lincoln who honestly tried to treat the South- 
erners as his countrymen. 

But we forbear, Mr. President ; the worst of 
Job's afflictions was his comforters. What we had 
in mind to do was not to offer you smelling-salts, 
nor yet to read you lectures, but to make you our 
respects. 

224 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

You have chosen, wisely we think, to become 
a teacher of young Americans, and you are am- 
ply equipped for your new duties. You will not, 
we are confident, teach them bitterness. You will 
not sully their "white shields of expectation.'* 
You will, on the contrary, try to prepare them to 
do their best cheerfully, in all circumstances, for 
their country. Nevertheless, there will come at 
times, in spite of all your good nature, intervals 
of austerity. For you have walked the heights of 
human destiny ; you have sounded the depths 
of human meanness and depravity. Sometimes, 
beyond your smile, you will wear that air of 
** grave and melancholy reflection " which Macau- 
lay praised inThucydides. And it will be well. It 
will be well that these young minds shall learn 
from you, though you will not wish to teach it, 
something of the human weaknesses that lead to 
great disasters, something of the baleful human 
passions that keep us all, nations and men alike, 
forever on the verge of tragedy. 



G 



TO WOODROW WILSON 

MARCH 4, 191 3 

OOD-MORNING, Mr. President! 



To you, indeed, it hardly seems needful 
that this journal should offer assurances of its own 
good- will and good wishes. In all its life no politi- 
cal enterprise has ever engaged its sympathies more 
deeply than that which ends to-day as you take 
your solemn oath of office. But to you, too, we can 
offer whatever heartening there may be in our con- 
viction that you also have the good-will and the 
good wishes of the majority of Americans. 

We have no fear, Mr. President, that you will 
overestimate the value of our own or any other 
assurances in that matter ; even if you agree with 
them, you will not vainly imagine that your pres- 
ent great prestige and popularity are a secure pos- 
session. For we feel sure that you are not politically 
short-sighted. We feel sure that you do not need to 
be told that the more auspiciously a man enters 
upon a great trial of his quality the more he has to 

226 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

fear from anything like failure to meet it worthily. 
You have shown convincingly that you understand 
the incessant nature of democracy's demands and 
the necessity of meeting them continuously, un- 
falteringly — of fighting all one's battles through, 
as Grant said — if one would survive politically. 

In that clear-eyed envisagement of obligations 
and of dangers we find, indeed, one of the chief 
sources of our hope in your administration ; for we 
regard it as one of the many proofs of your politi- 
cal competency. 

On this point, no doubt, we differ with many 
other observers of your career. For we do not in 
the least share the apprehension that your long 
years of devotion to academic tasks will be found 
to have dimmed your eyes to harsh realities. On 
the contrary, we take comfort from the circum- 
stance that you have all your life been studying 
in quiet such problems as now confront you, such 
careers as you yourself are now attempting. We 
are happy to feel that, like most Americans, 
but unlike your immediate predecessor, you like 
politics; that you understand politics; that you 
have already proved yourself an excellent politi- 

227 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

cian. We shall be disappointed if, before the end, 
you shall not have proved yourself a great politi- 
cian. 

So shall we all be, Mr. President, and so will you 
be ; for none of us has indicated a clearer compre- 
hension than you have indicated of what the times 
and the country's mood really demand of you. 
Administrative skill, executive efficiency — these, 
of course, are always demanded of a President. 
But you know that to-day, for you, they will not 
be enough. You know that you face a crisis ; that 
you may, quite conceivably, inaugurate an epoch. 
Before we take up, with other journals, our con- 
stant duty of unsparing criticism, perhaps you will 
permit us briefly to indicate what we conceive your 
full task and opportunity to be. 

It is to lead democracy in a fresh advance which 
it now clamors for. It is to guide democracy wisely 
while it compasses and overcomes a new kind of 
opposition that for some generations has been 
erecting itself among us; a kind of opposition to 
democracy which is all the more baffling and con- 
founding because it is, in the main, an outcome of 
democracy itself; because it is as if, in our startled 

228 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

battling with it, a giant strove with his own giant 
offspring. In this respect the curious instinct of 
the cartoonists is no false leading, but a true indi- 
cator of our real predicament. For the real foe of 
democracy in this country wears no form that privi- 
lege has ever worn before. It is not monarchical, 
it is not aristocratic, it is not military, it is not 
clerical. It is entirely economic and industrial. 
The seat and source of it is neither court nor camp 
nor church ; it is the common market-place. The 
essence of it is, to be sure, monopoly, and monopoly 
is old. But this kind of monopoly, self-created and 
self-sustaining monopoly, is new. It is young and 
vigorous. Of all the forces that make against de- 
mocracy it is the youngest and most vigorous now 
extant in the world. 

That is your giant antagonist, Mr. President; 
and democracy expects of you nothing less than 
that you forthwith prove yourself its Jack the 
Giant Killer. 

A great expectation, truly ! For the movement 
you must head, like most of democracy's periodi- 
cal uprisings and self-assertions, is vague and in- 
stinctive, as well as tremendous. But we cannot 

229 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

doubt that you both comprehend its sweep and 
are striving to find for it definite aims and reason- 
able methods. Fortunately, you are in deep sym- 
pathy with it; otherwise you could never hope to 
guide it. But fortunately, too, you have yourself 
written the history of another very similar move- 
ment — the movement by which the people, with 
Andrew Jackson leading, once before " took pos- 
session of their government." Turn to the skillful 
phrases in which you yourself have pictured that 
advance, estimated alike the gains and the costsof 
it, praised and blamed its leadership, and you will 
find there many a true word and many a sound re- 
flection that should to-day be helpful to you and 
to your fellows in leadership. For the present age 
seems plainly to demand of you that in many re- 
spects you be like Jackson. But it is a later age; 
may it not therefore demand more ? You have had 
abetter training than Jackson's, and no such harsh, 
embittering antecedents; may we not, therefore, 
expect of you less of error and violence and excess, 
and more of restraint and of just consideration and 
calm foresight, yet without loss of firmness in es- 
sentials ? 

230 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

Yes, Mr. President, it is a great expectation, a 
daunting expectation. We should be insincere, 
we should be merely flattering you — or any other 
man alive, for that matter — if we pretended an 
absolute assurance of your proving entirely equal 
to it. It is enough that, like your party and like the 
country, we should account you, of all men visible 
now to the nation, the man most likely to prove 
equal to it. 

We do not neglect to note your handicaps ; we 
shall not forget them when we fall back into our 
ordinary function of watchfulness and criticism. 
It was your immediate predecessor's misfortune to 
lead a party which had been too long in power ; it 
is your misfortune that you lead a party which has 
been too long out of power. It lacks the training 
power alone can give. It has the habit of irrespon- 
sible protest and criticism, not of responsible ac- 
tion. You will be surrounded by men who can speak 
only from conviction, not from experience. To 
keep your leadership you must be, perhaps, com- 
placent with ignorance and prejudice. Do not, we 
beseech you, be too complacent; for that may prove 
your greatest danger. We do not underestimate the 

231 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

necessity of tact and consideration and whatever 
else may make for harmony, but we would, never- 
theless, fortify you in loyalty to your own superior 
training and instincts. For it must be with you as 
with every other man lifted up to high place and 
great power. There is no way to spare you the duty 
of self-reliance ; there is no way to spare you the 
loneliness of your great station. If you relieve it 
with a kitchen cabinet, we, for one, shall not be 
too censorious. 

■ Your party is also hungry, for it comes in from 
a long wandering in the desert, and from this cause, 
too, you will face temptation and must endure a 
wearying importunity. More than that: because 
your party is unaccustomed to power, it will not 
be at ease in power. Part of your great task in leader- 
ship will be to teach it self-confidence ; yet it will 
be equally necessary to hold it back from over-con- 
fidence and extravagance. There will inevitably be 
required of you a constant and supremely difficult 
balancing of restraint and energy, of sympathy 
and steadfastness, of courage and caution. For 
the full test of you and your party will be noth- 
ing less than this: that through you democracy 

232 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

shall win victories and yet shall not abuse 
them. 

But if, Mr. President, we are thus candidly 
mindful of all that confronts you, we are also hap- 
pily mindful of much, of very much, to hearten 
and to help you. Happily for you, as for us all, you 
are the choice of no one section, but of the whole 
country. As your elevation excludes no one section 
from power, you will escape a kind of bitterness that 
has borne hard on many of your predecessors; and 
yet you will not lack the fine inspiration to be drawn 
from the peculiar pride in you of a particular sec- 
tion, a section strong in loyalties. Southern-born, 
it is your privilege to restore the South to a full 
share in the country's affairs, to help her prove her 
fitness for it, and to revive, let us hope forever, the 
great tradition of her spacious patriotism in the 
early days of the Republic. 

Less than this, perhaps, but far from little, will 
be the inspiration of your academic memories. At 
every crisis there will be the inspiring conscious- 
ness that to an extraordinary degree you represent 
in American public life the training and ideals of 
American colleges. There will be something still 

233 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

more poignant — the passionate, intimate appeal 
of your own ancient university, calling upon you, 
as with bells and songs, to win for her still greater 
honors. If need be, alma mater may serve you better 
still. If the worst comes to the worst, if the path 
of duty becomes the way of sacrifice, if it so hap- 
pens that you must lay down even popularity itself 
on the altar of patriotism, you can still see the tall 
tower with which she commemorates that other 
President of whom, in the hour of his seeming 
failure, you yourself wrote: " The men who assess 
his fame in the future will be no partisans, but 
men who love candor, courage, honesty, strength, 
unshaken capacity, and high purpose such as 
his." 

Yes, Mr. President, the task is great, the dangers 
manifold, and manifold the temptations. Eut all 
your youth will now, surely, rise up and reinforce 
your manhood. The great thing has happened — 
has happened to you, of all men. Surely you will 
not quail before it. Surely you will not lack in 
the face of opportunity and of danger the supreme 
human quality ; you will not lack courage — the 
kind of courage that is one with sincerity. As you 

234 



GREETINGS TO THE PRESIDENTS 

go to meet Fate's call, the time's demand, your 
country's summons, your mood will not be one of 
pride or self-sufficiency; yet surely it will be as 
if, in your own heart, a drum beat, or a trumpet 
sounded. 



THE END 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



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